The Cool War

VII

Bus to Odessa; prop plane to Dallas-Fort Worth; jet to Rome (where Hake spent ninety minutes racing back and forth on the back of a moped to collect a suitcase); jet to Capodichino Airport; monorail to the Bay; hovercraft to Capri. Hake had left Has-Ta-Va Ranch at two in the afternoon. Fourteen hours and eight time zones later, he was bouncing across the Bay at what local time said was noon but what his interior body clock could not identify at all. What he was sure of was that he was very, very tired. He was also rather close to being seasick. He had not expected a hovercraft ride to be so choppy. Each wave-top slapped fiercely against the bottom of the vessel, and his queasiness was not helped, as he landed, by the fact that the hovership terminal stank of rotting fish.

As promised, he was met. A young woman in a black ruffled shirt and black velvet cutoffs pushed her way past the would-be guides and the vendors of Capri bells and said, “Father Hake? Yes? Give me the ticket for your bag, please. I will meet you at the car park.”

Her voice seemed familiar to Hake, and so did her soupbowl hairdo. But in his precarious condition he could not identify her. When she arrived at the car park it was in a three-wheeled electric scooter, open to the air, and any impulse toward conversation was quelled by the noise of the traffic. Capri was hot. Steamy hot and smoggy hot. The fish smell was from tens of thousands of dead little finger-lings floating belly-up in the Bay or washed on the sand, and it stayed with them all through the drive up a precipitous road. Then, at the top of a bluff, they reached a pink stucco hotel, and the smell was less fish and more oil.

The woman marched Hake through the lobby and into an elevator, shushing him until they got to the fifth floor. A Chinese couple was just coming out of a room across from the elevator, and evidently having trouble with the lock. The woman leaped to help them, closed it securely, rattled the knob, returned their key and accepted their thanks, and then let Hake into the room next door. “Get some rest, Father Hake,” she advised. “I will call for you in the morning.”

She gave him his key, and closed the door behind her.

Hake found himself in a room roughly the size of his parsonage porch in Long Branch, long enough for two normal rooms and with a balcony stretching out into the Italian sun to make it longer. Piggery! It was more luxury than Hake had ever been used to. He detected a faint twinge in the place where he kept his social conscience, while another part of his conscience was telling him that he really should be getting down to thinking about the question of proselytizing religions. But he also found that it was not hard to convince himself that, after more than two weeks Under the Wire, a person was entitled to a little comfort. He kicked off his shoes and explored the room.

The bed was oval, and covered with tasseled red velvet. When Hake sat on the edge of it to rub his feet it gave his bottom no resistance. A water bed! He wound up with his posterior at about ankle level and a rigid board under his knees, and the returning ripples dandled him ut> and down for minutes. Next to the bed was what looked like the instrument panel of an airplane: buttons, dials, switches. Some were clear enough. The sunburst was for the lights. The stylized figures of a maid and a waiter for calling service. The remote control was for the television set. Others were opaque to Hake’s perceptions. But there would be time for that. He switched on the television and lay back on the rippling bed, gratefully chill beneath him after the hot ride from the hoverport.

At that moment the lights and TV went out.

It was not just his room. The liquid-crystal illuminated hotel sign over the reflecting pool was out, too; so was the golden glow-panel over his balcony that recklessly had been going even in the middle of the day. There had been a power failure.

Since power interruptions were so familiar a part of Hake’s everyday life he began at once to catalogue what problems it might bring. Lack of heat, not a problem. Lack of reading lights—well, apart from the fact that it was broad daylight outside the window, he was starved for sleep anyhow. Lack of air-conditioning? Maybe that would be a problem. He opened the French doors to the balcony, just in case. Elevators, TV, telephones were no immediate concern of his.

So there was, really, no problem. It seemed a heavensent injunction to catch up on his rest. He threw his clothes off, stripped back the velvet spread and summer-thin blanket and in a moment was wholly unconscious on the delightfully cool and quivering bed.

He woke up with the sound of an angry Italian voice bellowing at him, and discovered at once that the cool was no longer delightful.

It was the middle of the night. The lights were on, in his room and outside. The voice was from the television set, which had come on along with the lights and air-conditioner. The breeze outside had turned cool, and the air-conditioner was making it cooler still. In fact, he was freezing. He fumbled the sound of the TV down, and the voice of the Italian man in the commercial, who appeared to be enraged because his wife had put the wrong brand of cheese on his pasta, dwindled to a furious whimper.

Hake puzzled over his watch—the bedside clock was of course useless—and decided that he had slept the clock around. It seemed to be about two in the morning, local time. He did not feel rested, but he was awake and, worse, shivering cold. He managed to get the air-conditioner turned off and the window closed, then climbed back on the bed with thin blanket and stiff spread pulled around him. It was not enough. The water under him sucked the heat away, and there was no heat in the room. Not surprising. Who would have expected to need central heating in Capri in the summer? He told himself that his body warmth would soon enough make the bed comfortable, and to distract himself he tried to decipher what was happening on the television set. It seemed to be showing straight commercials: cheese, wine, then a sports car, then the national lottery; a deodorant, an aphrodisiac (or perhaps just a perfume; but the bulge in the trunks of the handsome male model was pretty explicit), and then what appeared to be an institutional propaganda piece. It showed a young Italian youth, clearly stoned out of his mind. A sad baritone voice-over sighed, “Ecco, guaio perche fare cost?” The youth shrugged and giggled. The scene dissolved to the great cellar of a winery. In the vaulted room plastic kegs of wine were tumbling majestically off a conveyor belt, while at the far end of the chamber was a loading dock with a waiting and empty truck. The camera’s eye narrowed down on an abandoned forklift truck, alone in the middle of the room. Hake could not understand the sorrowful Italian-language voice-over, but the message was clear enough. The forklift operator was away from his post. The wine was not getting-onto the truck. The deduction that the missing operator was the blind-stoned kid was confirmed at once, as the scene changed to the following morning. The young man, no longer stoned, now repentant, stood humbly beside a white-haired man carrying a clipboard. Hake recognized the man at once, him or his double. He had seen him a hundred times on American television, tapping his glasses on a desk as he sold everything from stomach-acid neutralizes to hemorrhoid salve. By the end of the commercial the prodigal forklift operator had cleared away the backlog, the trucks were loaded and rumbling away, and the conveyor belt once more brought in its endless chain of kegs. Marijuana si—PCP no, said the fatherly baritone, as the same legend appeared on the screen.

Interesting enough, but Hake was still freezing. His body warmth was not up to the demands imposed on it by the heat-sink of twelve hundred liters of cold water.

He was still exhausted, but he accepted the fact that there was no way for him to get back to sleep without Something Being Done. He got up and dressed. By and by he began to feel less chilled, but no less sleepy. And every time he lay down on that bed, even through clothes, spread and covers, he could feel the heat soak right out of him into the water.

It was no good.

He turned on the light and opened his bags. The little shoulder-carrier he had brought from Under the Wire had a sweater in it, but as neither it nor he had been washed for some time when he last wore it he was not anxious to put it on. The suitcase Curmudgeon’s minion had packed for him in Long Branch had nothing at all. Almost nothing he could wear, in fact. The Agency expediter had packed as full a Capri wardrobe as Hake’s closets permitted, but unfortunately had not known that his measurements had changed. No doubt it was Hake’s own fault for not throwing out what he could no longer wear. But the shorts, tank tops and sports jackets that had served him well enough as a 145-pound weakling in a wheelchair would no longer go around him, and the few newer garments were not warm.

Still, as long as he was up and moving about he was warm enough. And as long as he was awake he might as well be doing something.

Among the other things he had brought from Under the Wire were his microfiches—musty, dinged at the edges, but no doubt still serviceable if he could find something to read them with. Was there a fiche scanner on the television set?

There was. The instructions varnished to the top of the set were unfortunately in Italian, but the mechanism looked simple enough. What he also found was that the television set was a lot fancier than any he had seen in Long Branch. There was also something described as Solo per persone mature—film interattivo. It appeared to have a handset controlling it, but it did nothing at all until he realized that the coin slot next to it needed to be fed. It was just the right size for a cinquenta lire nuove piece, and immediately he had inserted the coin the broadcast channel disappeared and was replaced by an extremely good-looking Oriental girl reclining in the pose of the Naked Maja.

Technically the set was astonishing. Hake by trial and error found that the handset would let him view a whole catalogue of nude women, and men, too; that another control on the set allowed him to rotate the figure and zoom in and out on any desired part; and even that he could bring two figures together and manipulate them around each other. While he was trying to discover whether the picture showed them actually in contact or merely superimposed photographically his coin ran out and the screen went dark.

That had been interesting, also somewhat unsettling. Hake got up and explored the rest of the room’s facilities. Under the TV was something called Servizio, which turned out to be a little refrigerator and bar stocked with whiskey, wine, fruit juices and beer. He thought for a moment of getting drunk enough to supply French central heating and going back to sleep; but that way, he suspected, lay pneumonia. Still, one beer wasn’t a bad idea. Carrying it, he checked out the bathroom. The toilet seat vibrated on command, he found. The shower head pulsed, and so, he discovered, did the spray in the bidet. Behind a panel near the door was a coffee maker and a bun warmer, and when he sat on the edge of the still chill bed to drink a cup of hot coffee he kicked something and found that the bed, too, could be made to ripple rhythmically by pushing a switch. Quite an inventive room.

It was not, however, a room to be alone in. Everything urged company, and Hake didn’t have any.

What was worse, one of the girls on the television had reminded him of Mary Jean. He sat daydreaming of Mary Jean as a possible subject for film interattivo, and then of Alys, and of Leota, and realized he had a problem. It was a problem most men face, some of them very often, but Hake growing up in a wheelchair had learned to sublimate and to repress that problem, and the new Hake, the muscular Hake of the barbells and the two-mile runs, the action-oriented Hake from Under the Wire—that Hake was a different person. That Hake wanted a different solution, and there was none in sight.

He dumped the rest of the coffee, put his clothes on and ambled out of the room.

The long and silent hall was empty, the ceiling lights economically dimmed down. There was a dank, musty smell that he had not remembered, and a large, semicircular water stain by the Chinese couple’s door that he had not noticed before. Rather poor management, he thought; would there be anyone in the lobby? Maybe an all-night coffee shop to get something to eat?

The lobby was also dimmed-down and silent, but he managed to wake the desk clerk long enough to get change, and from the automatic vending machines he got candy bars, a Rome Daily American, and even an Arabic-language daily published in Naples. Then he returned to his room.

Reminding himself that he was not in Capri for pleasure, he pulled the covers off the bed and spent the next hour reading and eating candy bars, lying on the floor. After an hour or so he made the trip down to the lobby again for some fifty-lire change and ultimately fell asleep, with the light on, on the floor.

At ten the door buzzer woke him.

The room was now intolerably hot, and his bones ached from the floor, but he opened the door. It looked like the girl who had met him at the hoverport, but was not. It was male. “Mario?” he guessed.

The youth smirked. “Yes, of course Mario,” he said. “But you did not recognize me as a signorina, did you? We must not often be seen together, you see—Hake! What insanity have you been up to?”

“What? Oh, you mean why the room is this way. Well, we had a power failure. And I nearly froze to death on that bed.”

Mario’s eyebrows rose. He switched on the air-conditioner and said, “Why did you not use the bed heater? What heater? Oh, Hake, you are such an innocent 1 Here, this switch on the side. You set it to whatever temperature you would like. Thirty-five if you want it, or even more.”

“Oh, hell.” Now that it was explained, it was perfectly obvious. He dialed it to forty degrees, promising himself at least a nice warm nap. As he straightened up, Mario was approaching him with what looked like an elaborate silver-filigree bracelet. “Hey, what’s that for?”

Mario snapped it on his wrist. “So that you may enjoy that bed with the companion of your choice, or with none at all,” he said good-humoredly.

“It’s a sexual-preference thing? I’ve never seen it.”

“A local custom,” Mario explained. “If you wear this it indicates you do not wish anyone to inaugurate a sexual approach to you. See, I also wear one. Without it on, you would be kept quite busy and it would perhaps interfere with your duties. You will find that such bracelets are quite scarce on Capri, for after all why else would anyone come here?”

“Well—” said Hake.

“Oh, do not fear, when you are off duty you may remove it! Now, do you wish to shower, or at least dress?”

“I suppose so. Oh, and listen,” Hake said, “I haven’t been wasting my time. I managed to get a couple of papers last night, and checked all the stories about religion.”

“Very commendable, Hake,” Mario said, glancing at his watch.

“There wasn’t an awful lot, but there was one stroke of luck. I found an editorial in something called, what is it, Corriere Islamica di Napoli about an interesting youth cult. There’s this fellow in Taormina—”

“That is splendid, Hake, but please, your shower. We must hurry. Of course you will want a coffee? Then you can tell me all about it. But the taxi is waiting, and my expense account—well, you know what it is like with one’s expenses!”

Actually Hake did not know. He had never had an expense account from the Team. But if what Mario had meant to imply was that his expenses would be scrutinized it seemed to Hake strange that they should take a taxi all the way to Anacapri to sit and drink morning coffee in an open-air restaurant exactly like twenty-five others they had passed on the way; and then to take another taxi all the way back to a restaurant that turned out to be a block from Hake’s hotel, for the lunch Mario insisted he had to have at the stroke of twelve. It seemed to Hake that Mario was not a very efficient secret agent. In fact, flaky. The Mario of Munich and the rest of the flu-spreading trip had been subdued and deferential; this one was more like a plumbing salesman on a tour.

And when the lunch came Mario picked at it. He was obviously much more interested in the nearly nude dancers in the floor show than in eating. He divided his time between staring at them as they whipped off their peasant skirts to reveal nothing much beneath, and nudging Hake and peering at his face excitedly. Hake felt distinctly uncomfortable. Mario had been much the same on the patio at Anacapri, where bar girls in bikinis had served them their cappuccinos. In neither place did he seem very interested in the Islamic youth cult Hake had boned up on out of the Arab-language newspaper and a few discreet questions to the Lebanese night porter at the hotel.

It all seemed like an awful waste of time to Hake, and the situation did not get better. After the lunch Mario had barely picked at, he said, “Well, perhaps it would be as well for you to rest this afternoon. I will meet you for dinner. And then we will plan our activities for tomorrow.”

“What activities? Look, Mario, I came here on a specific mission, and Curmudgeon said it was of the highest priority.”

“Ah, Curmudgeon,” said Mario, shrugging easily. He took a nail-clipper from his pocket, signaled for the check and began manicuring his already perfect nails. “At Headquarters what do they know of us in the field, eh? You are doing very well, Hake. There is no need to try to impress the home office with your diligence. In our work it is always essential to move with precise knowledge, according to a plan. Speed? Yes, sometimes. But caution and precision, always.”

“But—”

“Hush!” Mario gestured at the waiter, coming to bear away check and credit card. “Have the goodness to postpone this conversation to a more opportune time,” he said coldly. Then he dropped his napkin—on purpose, as it appeared to Hake—and bent down to retrieve it. There was a quiet but definite sputtering sound from under the table. The lights went out, and Mario sat up, rubbing his fingers.

Hake stared. “Mario! What the hell did you do?”

“I warn you again, Hake, not here! Have they taught you nothing in Texas?” Mario whispered furiously. They sat in angry silence until the waiter returned, carrying check and card, his expression embarrassed. Hake could not understand a word of the Italian, but the sense was clear enough. Due to this wholly unforeseeable interruption to the electricity, the computer was unable to process the credit card.

Mario held his hand up forgivingly. “Capisco,” he said. “Va bene. Ecco—due cento, tre cento, tre cento cinquenta, e basta. Ciao.”

“Grazie, grazie, tanto, arrivederla,” said the waiter, clutching the wad of lire gratefully.

And walking along the crowded street, on the short block back to the hotel, Mario said, “Yes, of course it was I. Why do you think I selected that table? There was an electric outlet beneath it for the cleaning. Have you not been taught, it is the little things that add up?”

“And last night in the hotel. Did you do that, too?”

“Of course I did, Hake. Both the electricity and the flooding. I wedged the lock in that room door, and when I left you I turned on their taps, just a trickle, with a washcloth stuffed in the drain. Were you not taught such things?”

“Christ, no.” Hake thought silently for a moment. At the steps to the hotel he said, “You know, all that seems pretty chickenshit to me. You’re just annoying people. You’re not doing any real damage.”

“I see! And that is not worthy of your efforts, Master American Spy? What a pity! But it is exactly this that we must do, on a small scale or large! The lit match in the mailbox. The phone off the hook. The emergency cord pulled in a tram at the rush hour. Each is tiny, but together they are great!” -

“But I don’t see—”

“But, but, but,” said Mario, “always there is a ‘but’! I have no time to explain these simple things to you, Hake. I have much to do. Go inside. Swim in the pool, meet some signorinas—you may take off your bracelet, and then you will see! And I will meet you tonight for dinner—and,” he twinkled, “perhaps I will have a surprise for you! Now go, I do not wish to be seen too often in your hotel.”

But when they met later, Mario’s mood had changed again. He drove the three-wheeled Fiat-Idro vengefully along Capri’s narrow roads. After ten minutes of it, Hake asked, “Are you going to tell me what you’re angry about?”

“Angry? I am not angry!” Mario snapped over the noise of the wind. And then, relenting, “Well, perhaps I am. I have had sad news. Dieter is in jail.”

“That’s too bad,” Hake said, although in his heart he was not moved. “What’s he in for?”

“For the usual thing, of course! For doing his job.”

Mario drove in silence for some minutes, and then, surprisingly, his face cleared. Hake stared around to see why. They were passing through an olive grove, where crews of Ethiopian laborers were cutting down trees, stacking them and burning them. The smoke drifted unpleasantly across the road. It was a hot evening anyway; the wisps of steam from the Fiat’s exhaust vanished almost at once into the air, and the laborers were glistening with sweat. But Mario seemed pleased. “At least some things go well,” he said obscurely. “Now observe, we are almost there.”

Their destination turned out to be an open-air trattoria on the brink of a precipice. They drove under a vine-covered arch, atop it a bright liquid-crystal sign that showed what looked like an ancient Roman peasant being shampooed with a huge fish. The name of the place was La Morte del Pescatore. Mario tossed the Fiat’s keys to a parking attendant, and led the way between tables and waiters to a banquette overlooking the cliff.

And there, beaming at them, was Yosper.

“Well, Hake!” he said, rising to shake hands from the meal he had not waited to start, “so we meet again! Are you surprised?”

Hake sat down and spread his napkin on his lap before. he answered. When he had seen Yosper last it had been in Munich, along with Mario and Dieter and the other two young thugs who had accompanied him; and none of them had responded by word or hint to any of his overtures about the Team.

“Not really,” he said at last.

“Of course you weren’t,” Yosper agreed heartily. “I knew you understood we were part of the gang in Germany.”

“Then why didn’t you say something?”

“Oh, come on, Hake! Didn’t they teach you anything in Texas? All information is on a need to know basis, that’s doctrine. There was no need for you to know; you were doing fine without it. And declassifying is always contra-indicated when it might jeopardize a mission. Which it could have; who knew what you might take it into your head to do? The whole point of what you were doing was that you were a simple man of God, doing the Lord’s work in Europe. What better cover could you have than to believe it yourself?” He raised a hand to forestall Hake. “And then, of course,” he said, “that was just your first training mission. We all do a blind one first. That’s doctrine, too. Can’t expect special treatment, can you, Horny?”

“Can Dieter expect special treatment?” Mario put in sullenly.

“Oh, Mario, please. You know that Dieter will be taken care of. A few days, a we^k or two at the most—well have him out of there. Don’t we always?”

“We don’t always get put in a Neapolitan jail,” Mario responded sulkily.

“That’s enough.” There was a distinct silence, and then Yosper continued on sunnily, “Now, as I’m well ahead of you, why don’t you both order? There’s excellent seafood here. Though not, of course, local.”

After a moment, Mario began ordering methodically from the most expensive items on the menu. He did not meet Yosper’s eyes, but the old man was only looking amused. Hake settled for a fritto misto and a salad, unwilling to load his stomach in the heat. When the waiter had gone, he said, “Is it all right to talk here?”

“We have been, haven’t we? Don’t worry. Mario will let us know if anyone is pointing a microphone at us.”

“Then let me tell you what I’ve done about our project. I told Mario that last night I found some interesting leads in the newspapers. This afternoon I went to the American Library and did a little research. There’s useful stuff. The most interesting is a new Islamic cult that preaches a return to purity, no intercourse with infidels, four wives to a man, instant divorce—for men, of course—and all the rest. Just like Mahmoud himself. It’s not here on Capri. It’s mostly in a place called Taormina, but there’s also a center in a town named Benevento. According to the map, that‘s up in the hills, not very far from Naples.”

Yosper nodded judiciously, mopping up his salsa verde with a chunk of bread. “Yes, that sounds promising,” he conceded.

“It sounds like just what I’m supposed to be looking for!” Hake corrected. “Or almost. I’m not sure that Curmudgeon wanted me to get involved with Islam. I got the impression that he was thinking more of some fundamentalist Christian sort of sect— What’s the matter?”

Yosper had put down his bread and was scowling fiercely. “I don’t want to hear blasphemy,” he snapped.

“What blasphemy? It’s the operation I’m assigned to, Yosper. My orders are—”

“Fuck your orders, Hake! You are not going to despoil the word of God. Stay with your Mohammedans, who the hell cares about their false idols? Don’t mess with your sweet Redeemer!”

“Now, wait a minute, Yosper. What do you think I’m doing here?”

“Following orders!”

“Whose orders?” Hake demanded hotly. “Yours? Curmudgeon’s? Or am I supposed to make up my own little trick-or-treat pranks like Mario, blowing fuses and setting fire to mailboxes?”

“You are supposed to do what you’re told to do by the officer in charge, which in this case is me.”

“But this mission—^” Hake stopped himself as the waiter approached, wheeling a table with a solid-alcohol lamp under a huge chrome bowl. By the time the waiter and the maitre d’ had finished collaborating on Mario’s fettuccine Alfredo, Hake had a grip on himself.

“All right,” he said. “How about this? Suppose I found some Christian revivalist to preach abstinence, to cut the population down? I know it would be slow, but—”

Mario chuckled. “In Italy?”

“Yes, in Italy. Or anywhere. Perhaps it shouldn’t be abstinence but birth-control, or even homosexuality—”

Mario was no longer laughing. “That’s not funny.”

“I don’t mean it to be funny!”

“Then,” said Mario, “it’s funny. Grotesque, even. Not the homosexuality, but your bigoted, out-of-date attitude toward male love.” He had stopped eating, and the look on his face was hostility and wrath.

Yosper intervened. “You two quit fighting,” he ordered. “Eat your dinner.” And after a moment he began a conversation with Mario in Italian.

Hake ate in silence, averting his eyes from both of his table companions. They did not seem to mind. Their conversation appeared to be about the food, the wine, the models who moved around the restaurant displaying furs, jewels and bathing suits—about anything and everything that didn’t include Hake. It was a lot like it had been in Germany, and Hake was beginning to have a bad feeling. What was going on? Once again, the situation did not add up. The mission that had been top-priority urgent in Texas did not seem to matter at all on Capri. What was he carrying this time?

For that matter, what was he doing in Italy at all? He did not fit into this expensive restaurant filled with the idle rich, or with the rich corrupt: Ex-oil sheiks in burnooses, black American dope kings, Calcutta slumlords and Eastern European film stars. Hake had not realized there was so much money in the world. Mario’s fettuccine cost as much as a week’s shopping at the A&P in Long Branch, and the bottle of Chateau Lafite he was washing it down with would have made a sizeable down payment on repainting the parsonage porch. Not just the money. Energy! He had become calloused to power-piggery, with all the jet fuel he had burned for the Team, but this! The illuminated sign outside the restaurant alone would have kept his heater going for weeks. And it was not even in good taste. The liquid crystal display showed a man in Roman peasant costume either trying to snap at a huge fish or trying to avoid it: the fish moved in toward his face, the man’s head bobbed away, and back and forth again.

Yosper leaned over and said, “Got over your bad mood?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “There’s a story behind that sign, you know.”

“I was sure there would be,” Hake said.

“Oh, come off it, will you? We’ve got to work together. Let’s make it easy on ourselves.”

Hake shrugged. “What’s the story?”

“Urn. Well, one of the Roman emperors used to live around here, and he took walks along this cliff. One day a fisherman climbed up from the beach to make his emperor a present of a fish he had just caught. It didn’t work out very well. The emperor was pissed off at being startled, so he ordered his guard to rub the fish in the man’s face.”

“He sounds like a mean son of a bitch,” Hake observed.

“That’s about the nicest thing you could say about him, actually. That was Tiberius. He’s the one who crticified our Lord, or anyway appointed Pontius Pilate, who did. There’s more to it. The fisherman wasn’t real smart, and when the guard let him up he wised off. He said, ‘Well, I’m glad I tried to give the fish to you instead of the other thing I caught.’ ‘Let’s see the other thing he caught,’ Tiberius said, and the guard opened up the bag, and it was a giant crab. So Tiberius had the guard give him a massage with that, and the fisherman died of it.”

“Nice place,” Hake said.

“It has its points,” said Yosper, eyeing two models displaying lingerie. “I hope you’ve been paying attention to them. Well! How about a sweet? They do a beautiful crepes suzette here.”

“Why not?” said Hake. But that wasn’t the real question; the question was why? And how? What was the purpose of this silly charade, and where did the money come from? Especially bearing in mind Mario’s remarks about his, expense account, what could possibly justify the tab they were running up in this place?

And would continue to run up—until the night ran out, it began to appear. Neither Yosper nor Mario seemed in the least interested in leaving. Finished with the crepes, Mario proposed brandies all around; after the brandies, Yosper insisted on a lemon ice “to clear the palate.” And then they settled down to drinking.

Toward midnight their waiters went off duty and were replaced by bar girls, a different one with every round and all pretty, and there had been a sort of floor show. The comedians had been pretty much a waste of time, being obliged to operate in half a dozen languages, but the strip-teasers were handsome women, a regular United Nations of them in a variety of colors and genotypes, and so were the models, hostesses and hookers who continued to stroll through the room. Hake provisionally decided that his guess about Mario’s inclinations had been wrong, judging by the way his attention came to a focus every time a new girl came near, but he was losing interest. He wasn’t just sick of being in this restaurant, he was pretty sick of Mario, too. The youth felt obliged to point out each celebrity and notoriety he recognized: “That’s the girl who played Juliet at the Stratford festival last year. There’s Muqtab al’Horash, his father owned thirty-three oil leases. He comes here to buy things for his harem off the models. Now and then he buys a model. There’s the President of the French Chamber of Deputies—” Hake felt he had been condemned to spend his life in this gaudy, raucous room that he was sick of, with Mario, whom he was sick of, and especially with Yosper, of whom he was sickest of all. The man just did not stop talking. And he was not your common or garden variety of bore, who will keep on regardless of blank expression or eyes darting this way and that, seeking escape; Yosper wanted full attention, and enforced it. “What’s the matter, Hake? Falling asleep? I was telling you that this is Italy. The national motto is Niente 2 possible, ma possiamo tutto. Everything’s illegal, but if you have the money you can do what you like. ‘S good duty, right, Mario? And heaven knows we’re entitled—”

But to what? To this endless ordeal of squirming in a shag velour armchair, while beautiful women kept bringing drinks he didn’t want? Hake had the Munich feeling, the conviction that a script was being played out that he had had no part in writing, and in which he did not know his lines. In Germany the feeling had been uncertain and only occasional—until that woman, what’s her name, Leota, had turned up and made it all concrete. Here it was real enough, but he did not understand what was going on.

Yosper was back on the subject of the emperor Tiberius, and growing argumentative. It was not the drink. He had been drinking three Perrier waters for each brandy, Hake had observed, but he was warming to his subject. Or subjects. All of them. “Come right down to it,” he declaimed, “old Tiberius was right about the fisherman. Asshole had no business coming into a restricted area, right? You can’t exercise power without discipline. Can’t enforce discipline without a little, what you might call, cruelty. Study history! Especially around here, where it all happened. When the Christians and the Turks fought naval battles over this part of the world they didn’t fool around with compassion. Turk caught a Christian, like enough they’d stick him ass-down on a sharpened stake by the helm, to keep the steersman company. Christians caught a Turk, same thing. And you know, those poor impaled buggers used to laugh and joke with the helmsmen while they were dying! Now, that’s what I call good morale.”

Mario staggered to his feet. “Excuse me,” he said, heading for the men’s room. Yosper laughed.

“Good kid,” he said, “but he has a little trouble confronting reality now and then. Symptom of the times. We all get taught that it’s bad to hurt anybody. ‘S what’s wrong with the world today, you want my opinion.”

“What’s wrong with the World tonight,” Hake said recklessly, “is I’m really tired of this place. Can’t we go?”

Yosper nodded approvingly and signaled for another round. “You’re impatient,” he said. “That’s the same as eager, and that’s a good thing. But you have got to learn, Hake, that sometimes the best thing you can do is just sit and wait. There’s always a reason, you know. Maybe we don’t know it, but it’s there.”

“Are you talking about God or Curmudgeon?”

“Both, Hake. More than that. I’m talking about duty. My family’s duty-oriented. It’s what I’m proudest of. We paid our bills. My Dad, he was gassed at Verdun, did you know that? Burned him right out. After that it took him twelve years of trying before he could knock Mom up, so I could be born. But he made it. I’m right proud of Dad. No, listen to me, Hake, what I’m saying’s important. It’s duty. That means you have to pay your dues on demand. Maybe it’s a Roman short-sword in the guts, or an English cloth-yard arrow at Crecy. Molten lead. Pungee pits. Flame throwers—you’d be amazed how much fat’ll come out of a human body. Why, when they opened the shelters in Dresden after the firestorm, there was an inch of tallow on the floor all around.”

“Or maybe,” snarled Hake, “it’s just sitting in a gin-mill on the Isle of Capri, listening to somebody trying to turn your stomach.”

Yosper grinned approvingly. “You’ve got it, Hake. That’s duty. Doing what you’re told.”

He held up, while the cocktail waitress brought them their new drinks. Behind her was another woman, slim and tanned, wearing an assortment of mood jewelry and not much else. “Speak English?” she inquired. When Yosper nodded she handed them each a card, then gracefully displayed her wares. She was more interesting than the things she had to sell; they were out of any sex shop in America. Marriage ring, divorce ring, open marriage ring; a “try it on” mood brooch in the shape of a bunny’s head, eyes dilated when the wearer was available, contracted when not; vasectomy badge, laparoscopy bow-knot choker, fertile period locket; gay shoulder-knots and SM leather wristlets. There were very few sexual interests you could not be outfitted for from her selection. She showed them all before leaving with a smile and a trail of familiar perfume.

” ‘Spalducci’s Bottega,’ ” Yosper read from the card. “Works of the devil, those places, but I have to admit the girl herself has the look of something from a better Maker. Oh, I’m not one of your religious bigots, Hake. I can understand temptation for the sins of the flesh. Didn’t Our Lord Himself stand on that mountain, while the Devil offered him all the treasures of the earth? And He was tempted. And—”

His voice stopped. He sat up straight, peering across the tables. Mario was hurrying toward them, buttoning and zipping as he came, his face agitated. As soon as he was in earshot he called something in Italian, tapping his silver bracelet; Yosper asked a sharp question in the same language, and the two of them sped for the doors.

Hake sat there, watching them go. When they were out of sight he turned his card over. There was a message penciled on the back:

Meet me Blue Grotto 0800 tomorrow.

It was no more than he had expected when he saw that the model had been the girl from Munich and Maryland, Leota Pauket.

It was three a.m. before he got back to his hotel. Yosper and Mario, sitting grim-faced and silent next to him, refused to answer questions, curtly ordering him to stay put until called for. He didn’t need answers, or at least not from them.

And he did not stay put. He set his alarm and by six wafc on his way down to the waterfront.

The only words Hake had to discuss his intentions were “Blue Grotto” and quanto costa. They would have to serve. There was no difficulty finding the right quayside. All quaysides were right. Wherever he looked were signs in every language, urging tourists to the Blue Grotto. The difficulties were the weather, which was wet and gray, and the time of day, which was a lot too early for your average Capri boatman to be ready for a customer. The big party boats inshore were still under canvas, and deserted. Farther out on the catwalk were a cluster of smaller ones, propelled by the stored kinetic energy of flywheels; a few of them had people working around them, but none seemed up to speed. If the signore would wait just an hour, perhaps at most two… If the signore could only defer his desires until the time when the tour buses began to arrive… But Hake did not dare wait. If Leota wanted to see him in private, she would be gone by the time the traffic grew heavy.

It took time and patience. But Sergio suggested Em-anuele, who thought Francesco could help, who directed Hake to Luigi, and at the end of the list Ugo had just unclutched his flywheel. They were off.

The diamond-shaped craft whirred down the coastline, with surf pounding the base of the cliffs a few hundred yards to their left. The flat flywheel amidships was not merely the power source for the screw. It served as a sort of gyroscope as well, leveling out some of the rock and pitch of the waves. That was not altogether a good thing, as Hake perceived as soon as the first chops began to splash over the coaming. By the time they turned in toward the steep cliffs around the Grotto, he was drenched with salt water and a fairly high amount of floating oil.

Ugo explained, by signs and gestures, that as the only entrance was by sea they would now moor the power vessel to a buoy and transfer to the rubber raft they had been towing behind. “No, Ugo, not so fast,” said Hake, and began signs and gestures of his own.

When the boatman realized what Hake wanted, he exploded into Neapolitan fury. Hake did not need to understand a word of Italian to comprehend both the premises and the conclusion of his syllogism perfectly. Major premise, timing the waves and judging the currents at the cave entrance required every bit of the skill and training of a master boatman, such as himself. Minor premise, the turista clearly didn’t have the skill to navigate soap out of a bathtub. Conclusion, the best that could come of this mad proposal was that he would lose fee, tip and an extremely valuable rubber boat. The worst was that he would be sentenced for cold-blooded murder. And the whole thing was out of the question. But money talked. Hake handed over enough lire to arrange for the boatman to expect him in an hour, and he entered the rubber boat.

The raft had no draft, and thus no consistency of purpose. Hake had no skill, and so entering the cave became a matter of brute force and persistence. On a negligible ledge near the cave two slim young men were sun-> ning their already dark bodies, and Hake’s flounderings took place under their amused and interested eyes. A powerful little hydrogen-outboard was bumping against its moorings just below them. Hake wished he could borrow the boat, but saw no way to accomplish it. In any event, he was committed. The rock ledges of the low cave entrance looked seriously sharp. Avoiding puncture, Hake almost lost an oar. Reclaiming the oar, he misjudged a wave and crunched the side of his skull against the low roof of the cave. But then he was through… and suspended in space.

From the outside the Grotto had looked neither blue nor inviting, but inside it was incredible. The sun that beat through the tiny entrance came in by a submarine route. By the time it illuminated the interior of the cave all of the warm frequencies had been trapped underwater, and what glowed inside the Grotto was pure cerulean. More. The light was all below the surface. Oil slicks marked the interface between air and water, but where there was no oil there seemed to be nothing below the level of Hake’s boat: he was floating in blue space, topsy-turvy, disoriented— and enchanted.

He was also alone.

That was not a surprise in itself; it was far too early for the tour boats. But it was already past eight o’clock. Finding the boat and arguing with its owner had taken longer than it should, and where was Leota?

A string of bubbles coming in from the cave mouth answered him. Under them was a wavery pale shape that could have been a large fish, began to resemble a mermaid and then became Leota, air tanks strapped to her back and breathing gear over her face. She moved upward through the bright water and surfaced a few yards away. She pulled the face mask off and hung there for a moment, regarding him, then swam to clutch the end of the raft. “Hello, Hake,” she panted, her voice tiny in the huge wet space.

Hake looked down at her, almost embarrassed. Apart from the straps for the air tanks, the woman was wearing very little—la minima, it was called—a brightly colored triangular scrap of cloth below her navel, held by thin cords, and nothing above. “Get in, for God’s sake,” he said.

“I’ll get you all wet and oily.”

“Get in, get in!” He leaned to starboard while she climbed in from port, and they managed to get her aboard without tipping over. They regarded each other silently for a moment before he demanded, “What are you doing in Italy?”

She threw her hair back and wiped oil from her face. “Better things than you are, at least. I never thought you’d be pushing drugs.”

“Drugs?” But even as he spoke, he knew he did not doubt her.

“That’s right, Hake. That’s what your bunch is up to. I’m willing to believe,” she conceded, “that you didn’t know it, because I don’t think it’s your style at’all. But there it is.” She turned to study the empty cave entrance for a moment. “I have ten minutes, no more,” she added. “Then you stay here for a while and I’ll go. Don’t try to follow me, Hake. I have friends—”

“Oh, for God’s sake. Look, first things first. Are you sure about the drugs?”

“Bloody damn sure,” she said. “The Italian cops put one of your boys away for it yesterday. Stopped him in that galleria in Naples, with a satchel full of Xeroxed directions for making angel dust.”

“I never heard of angel dust!”

“What they call pay-chay-pay. PCP. It’s an old drug, comes back every twenty years or so—when a new generation comes along that doesn’t know what it can do to you. One or two shots can screw up your head forever. Thing is, it’s the easiest thing in the world to make. Any high-school kid can put it together in Mom’s kitchen if he has the directions. Your boy was selling the recipe to all the ragazzi in Naples—until one of them finked to the fuzz.”

They were drifting close to the wall of the cave. Awkwardly Hake sculled them a few yards farther away, while Leota watched with amusement. He said doggedly, “I don’t want to call you a liar, but I didn’t think the, uh, the group I’m involved with would do anything like that. How do you know this person worked for us?”

“Oh, I know. Who do you think alerted the Italian narcs to plant the kid in the galleria? You want the details?” She leaned back against her air tanks and recited: “Dietrich Nederkoorn, comes from a little fishing village in Holland, deserted the Dutch Army three years ago, worked for your boys ever since at one crummy thing or another. About twenty-five. Gay. Beatle haircut. Blue eyes, black hair, freckles, medium height.”

“Yeah,” Hake said slowly. “I saw him in Germany. But why would we do a thing like that?”

“What I’ve been asking you all along, Hake. I don’t mean why they would. I mean why you would. For the gorillas you work for, sure, it’s tailor-made. Very cost-effective. It’s like a bite of the apple from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Once you get it started, it runs itself. By now there must be a million of those circulars in Italy. If Nederkoorn weren’t such an asshole he wouldn’t be in the slammer now. The process was already on the way. There’s no way in the world the Italian narcs, or anybody else, can catch up with all those leaflets and all the copies that are being made. So there goes a whole generation of Italian kids. Thousands of them, maybe millions, are going to be showing up for work stoned out of their heads from something they scored two weeks back—• if they show up at all. It’s a big success, Hake. The government’s got an all-out drive against it right now, school assembly programs, TV commercials, rock stars traveling the country to campaign against it—for all the good that’s going to do,” she said bitterly. “What kind of human being does a thing like that?”

“I wish I could tell you,” Hake said unhappily. Well, part of it he could have told her. The obsession that caused Mario and the others to practice their petty harassments with fuse-blowers and tiny floods was enough to explain Dieter’s being unable to stop. But— “But I don’t know what I’m doing in this,” he said. “All I’ve done is sit around.”

She stared at him. “You didn’t know? Oh, Christ, Hake. The reason they brought you over here was to put the finger on me.”

“I never said a word!”

“No, Hake,” she said, with no anger in her tone, “I’m sure you didn’t. I wouldn’t be here if I weren’t. You’re dumb, yes. But not treacherous. You didn’t have to. Your tickle-taster took care of it for you.”

“What the hell’s a tickle-taster?”

“You’re wearing it right now, Hake.” She pointed to his silver wristlet. “Works sort of like a polygraph; it monitors your pulse and blood levels. All they had to do was wait until you went boing on the taster, and then see who caused it. Which was me. I knew they were close. They could figure I had to be working at one of three or four places on Capri, and all they had to do was plant you in them one after another until I turned up. Oh, Hake,” she said, actually smiling, “don’t look so guilty\ They would’ve got to me sooner or later.”

Hake stared at the judas on his arm, shining cold blue in the diffuse light. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Yeah. Well. Listen, there’s not much they can do to me. I’m on Italian territory. I haven’t done anything against the law here, or anyway not much. Besides, I helped the Italians find Nederkoorn.”

Hake said, “I think the way I was looking wasn’t so much guilty as just plain foolish. What will you do now?”

Her expression became opaque. “That much I don’t trust you, Hake.” And then she added, “Actually, there’s not much I can do. I’m blown, for here and now. I’ll move to another place. There are others who will stay and carry on—” She hesitated, glanced at her watch, and then said more rapidly, “And that’s what I wanted to see you for. Will you join up?”

“Join what?”

“Join on the side of the good guys! What the hell do you think? You can make up for a lot of crumminess if you’ve got the nerve to take a stand now.”

Hake brought his open palm down flat on the water, splashing the girl and startling her. He said furiously, “God damn it, Leota! How do I know your stupid games are any better than theirs? This whole situation is sick.”

“Then don’t make it sicker! Come on, Hake. I don’t expect you to fall into my arms now. I just want you to think about it. I’ve got to go, but I’ll give you time. Overnight. I’ll call you at your hotel tomorrow morning. Early. I’m sure they’re bugging your wire, so I won’t say anything. You speak. Just say hello. Say it once for yes, twice for no—three times for maybe. Which,” she added irritably, “is about what I’d expect from you. Then I’ll get in touch, never mind how. And, Hake. Don’t try setting any traps or anything. I’m not alone, and the other people on my side right now play rougher than I do.”

She picked up her face mask, but paused before putting it on. “Unless you’d care to say yes right now?” she inquired.

He didn’t answer, because there was a sound like a tiny rapid-fire cap pistol from the mouth of the cave. They both turned. The little hydrogen-powered outboard came bouncing through the opening and then arrowed straight toward them, looking as if it were suspended in blue space.

Hake grabbed an oar. He didn’t know the two men coming toward them, but it was a good bet that they worked for Yosper. “Get out of here, Leota!” he cried. “I’ll see if I can keep them busy—”

But she was shaking her head. “Oh, Hake,” she said sorrowfully, “no, they’re not yours. They’re a lot worse than that.”

Hake held the oar before him like a quarter-staff, but it was apparent that it would not be much use. The two men

were not very big, and certainly not formidably dressed. Like Leota, they wore i minimi. But unlike Leota, they carried guns. The one at the motor had a pistol, the other what looked like a rapid-fire carbine, pointed directly at Hake. It was now obvious that they were the two who had been lounging on the ledge outside; more than that, they had a somewhat familiar look—like someone he had seen somewhere before, and a lot like each other.

“Put your oar down, Horny,” Leota said. “I didn’t mean for this to happen, at all.”

The two men did not only resemble each other, they were almost identical. They had to be twins: tiny dark bodies, no more than five feet three, long straight black hair, neat short beards, black eyes. From under the tarpaulins Hake could see them sitting in the bucket seats on either side of the chattering outboard, Leota draped across the coaming on one side of them. Two well-to-do Eastern gentlemen enjoying the Mediterranean with a pretty girl: there was nothing in that spectacle to attract anyone’s attention. He could hear the first of the party boats arriving with its tandem flywheels whining away, but one of the men had his foot on Hake’s neck. “Easy, cock,” he said, grinning conventionally. “Don’t try to sit up. You’d just get all those nice people killed.”

“Do what they say, Horny,” said Leota. Hake didn’t answer. With a foot on his windpipe he couldn’t. And what was there to say?

They bounced over the gentle swell for twenty minutes or more. Then the machine-gun sound of the motor slowed, one of the men wrapped a cloth around Hake’s eyes, he was kicked in the small of the back, the tarps were dragged off him and he was prodded up a rope ladder. “Stay on deck, sweetie,” said one of the men in his high, accentless voice—to Leota, Hake assumed. Then one on each side of him they shoved him through a door and down a steep companionway. He heard a door close behind them, and one of the men said: “You can take the blindfold off now. And sit down.”

Hake unwrapped the rag from his face and blinked at them. He was in a low-ceilinged room, bunk beds at either end and a padded locker along the wall, under a porthole covered with a locked metal hatch. There was barely room for all three of them at once. He sat on the locker less because he had been told to than because it was the best way he had of establishing distance between them. But one of them pulled camp chairs from under a bunk, and they drew them up one on each side, facing him.

Then he remembered where he had seen them, or one of them, before. “Munich! When I was sick. I thought you were a doctor.”

“Yes, Hake, that was me. I am Subirama Reddi,” said the one on the left, “and this is my brother Rama. You can tell which is which because I am left-handed and my brother right. We find this useful. Also Rama has a scar over his eye, do you see? He got that from an American in Papeete, and it makes him mean.”

“Oh, no, not mean!” said Rama, shaking his head. “We will get along very well, Hake, provided that you do exactly as we say. Otherwise—” He shrugged, with an expression that was somewhere between a smile and a pout. They spoke perfect English, colloquial and quick if sometimes odd. It was not quite true that they had no accents. The accents were there, but they were not identifiable. To Hake, they sounded vaguely British, but he thought that to a Brit they would have seemed American—as though they had come from somewhere along the mid-Atlantic ridge, or perhaps from Yale. Their voices were as high and pure as lead tenors in a boy’s choir, though what they said was not childish. “What you must do,” Rama Reddi went on, “is to tell us completely and quickly all of the names of the agents you have worked with, and what you know of the operations of your agency.”.

This was not going to be a pleasant time, Hake realized. And it was all foolish, because he knew so little! He turned to Rama and began, “There isn’t much I can tell—” The next word was jolted out of his mouth as Subirama’s fist hit his ear. Hake turned toward him in rage, and Rama’s fist clubbed him on the other side. It was now clear why their opposing handedness was useful.

Subirama moved his chair back a few inches, and switched the gun he had been holding in his free hand to his good one. He spoke rapidly to his brother, who nodded and produced a rope. While Rama Reddi was tying Hake’s hands, Subirama said, “You Americans are very confident of your size and strength. I do not, actually, think you could prevail against either one of us in bare-hand combat, much less two. But I think that you might attempt something which would make it necessary for us to kill you. So we will remove temptation.” He waited until his brother had finished with Hake’s hands, and then drove his fist into Hake’s stomach. “Now,” he said conversationally, “we will start ‘with the names of the persons you have contacted in Italy so far.”

Before they were through Hake had told them everything they asked for. He did not try to resist, after the first few minutes. As long as they confined themselves to beating him he might survive, and even recover; but they made it clear that if he held out it would cost him his fingernails, his eyes and his life, in that order. He gave them names he didn’t know he remembered. All four of Yosper’s helpers. Every member of his class Under the Wire. He even gave a physical description of the woman who had led him to his first interview at Lo-Wate Bottling Co. and the sheep-herder who had driven him to the airport bus. He could not tell which parts interested them. When some name or event led them to demand more information, he did not see why. Why would they care about a Hilo avocado-grower’s wife? But they questioned him endlessly about Beth Hwa. He told them what he knew, everything he knew, some of it four and five times. Then they let him rest. Hake didn’t think they were being considerate. He thought their fists were sore.

He would have resisted more, he told himself, if he had had anything to resist for. But the talk with Leota had shaken him again: what was he doing working for the Team in the first place? Why had he left a perfectly comfortable, personally rewarding and socially useful life as a minister in New Jersey to involve himself in these desperate adolescent games? He climbed into one of the bunks, hungry, exhausted, feeling sick and in pain. He could not believe sleep would be possible, his head pounded so. Then he woke up with Leota sitting on the bunk beside him and realized he had been asleep after all.

“These are aspirins, take them,” she said.

He pushed her away and himself up, his head thundering lethally. “Get lost,” he snarled. “This is the bad-cop and good-cop routine, right? I saw it on television.”

“Oh, Hake! You are so terribly ignorant. The boys are bad, bad enough to kill you, more likely than not. And I’m good. Mostly good,” she corrected herself, holding out the pills. She put an arm behind his head while he drank the water to swallow them, and said, “You look like hell.”

He didn’t answer. He sat on the edge of the bunk for a moment, then tottered to the tiny toilet and closed the door behind him. In the mirror he looked even worse than he felt. His face was puffed out from chin to hairline; his eyes were swollen half shut, and his ears rang. He splashed cold water on it, but when he tried drying his face with a scrap of towel it hurt. He moved his lips and cheek muscles experimentally. He could talk, and maybe even chew; but it was going to be some time before he could enjoy it.

When he came out Leota was gone, but reappeared in a moment with a tray. She closed the door behind her, and Hake heard someone outside lock it. “Your friends are taking good care of me,” he said bitterly.

“They aren’t friends of mine, only allies. I told you I didn’t mean for this to happen.” She put the tray down and sat next to him. “I brought you some soup. After you eat I’ve got an ice bag for your face.”

He could not bring himself to say thank-you. He grunted instead, and allowed her to feed him a couple of spoonfuls of the thick soup. The rocking of the boat dumped half of each on his lap, and he took the spoon and bowl away from her. The soup was a minestrone, no more than lukewarm but not bad; and he was famished. He emptied the bowl while she talked. “I’m not responsible for the Reddis! Sometimes we work together, sure. But they’re mercenaries.

They’ll kill. They’ll do anything they’re paid to do. And they scare me.”

“What have you paid them to do to me?”

“Not me, Hake! We don’t pay them. They’re working for—” she hesitated, glancing at the door. “Never mind who they’re working for,” she said, but on her bare thigh, below the short terrycloth beach robe, her finger traced out the word Argentina. “Your own boys have hired them from time to time, I would guess. Right now, somebody else. What does it matter? But when my group needs help, sometimes they give it. If they hadn’t taken out your friend Dieter’s bodyguard, he never would have been arrested. So with their help we stopped your people from killing kids.”

“And how did they take out the bodyguard?”

She flinched. “He was a mercenary, too. What does it matter?”

“You say that a lot,” he commented. “It matters to - me.”

“Well, it matters to me, too,” she said sadly. “But what’s worse, Horny? What kind of people pass out poison dope?”

He took the ice bag from her and gingerly applied it to his jaw. His head was still hammering, but it was a slower, less shattering beat. “Well,” he said, “I’ll grant you there are faults on both sides. Just for curiosity, what did you think was going to happen in the Grotto?”

“I thought I’d try to recruit you to our side,” she said simply. “Don’t laugh.”

“My God, woman! What do you think I’ve got to laugh at?”

“Well, that’s it. I wanted to talk to you. The Reddis were • just supposed to stay outside and warn me if your boys came along, or if—excuse me, Horny—if you tried to bring me in, or anything like that.”

“Um.” Hake transferred the ice bag from right cheek to left thoughtfully. What she said made sense, but did not change the fact that he had spent three hours being beaten and was now held captive, with a future outlook that at best was not to be called promising. “I guess I know what an innocent bystander feels like,” he said resentfully.

“Innocent?” Leota closed her mouth to cut off the next words, and then, carefully, said, “I wouldn’t exactly call you innocent, Horny.”

“Well, all right! I made some mistakes.”

She shook her head sorrowfully. “You don’t really know what’s happening, do you? You think all this has happened at random.”

“Hasn’t it?”

“Random as a guided missile! Your boys go straight for the jugular every time.”

“No, that’s ridiculous, Leota. I’ve been with them often enough to know! They’re the most bumbling, incompetent—”

“I wish you were right!”

“Really! They picked me out just by chance in the first place. No reason.”

“You mean you don’t know the reason. There was one, believe me. They probably had you under surveillance for months before they pulled you in. Somebody spotted you as a likely prospect—”

“Impossible! Who?”

“I don’t know who. But somebody. I know how they work. First they pulled your records, then they did a full field check. You must have looked okay, but they had to be sure. So they called you in. You could have told them to get lost—”

“No, I couldn’t! I was in the Reserves. They just reactivated me.”

“Oh, yes, you could, Horny. You could always have just said no. What would they have done, taken you to court? But you didn’t. So you passed the first test, and then they slipped you a few bucks and gave you a dumdum assignment to try you out. Don’t look at me like that, Horny, that’s what it was. A two-year-old child could have done it, and probably better than you. But you did it, so you passed that test too, and when you found out what it was all about you passed another. You didn’t blow the whistle on them.”

“I couldn’t!”

The girl looked away. “Well, no, you couldn’t, Horny, because you probably wouldn’t have lived to get to a reporter. Somebody would have seen to that. Whoever fingered you in the first place probably had an eye on you. But, Horny, you didn’t know that. You didn’t even try; so you passed. Next stage: they send you to training camp. You pass with flying colors. They send you here to fink on me— Don’t tell me again you didn’t know you were doing it. If you’d thought at all you could have figured it out. Some kinds of coincidences can’t be coincidences. When you saw me you should’ve got suspicious.”

“By then it was too late.”

Long pause. “Yeah,” she said, and began to cry. “It’s a lot too late,” she managed to say.

It took some time for her meaning to penetrate.

When Leota had left him alone again Hake sat on the edge of the bunk, staring at the red denim coverlet of the upper bunk across the stateroom. He did not see it. His mind and his whole body were in standby mode. It was almost a kind of paralysis. In all the long years in the wheelchair he had never been so little in control of his own fate as he was now.

If indeed he had ever been in command of his fate. Everything Leota had said rang true. He had followed along a course that he could not believe had been of his own choosing. Passive. Obedient. Even cooperative. A willing accomplice of people he despised, doing things he loathed. Hake was not sure who he was. The brawler who had exulted in the fight with Tigrito was a person he could not recognize as himself.

It was murderously, densely hot in the little stateroom, and with the portholes sealed shut there was no air. At least the pain in his battered head was less. It was even bearable; Leota’s aspirins had worked. Or the bruises had dwindled in his consciousness in comparison with the implications of what she had said. Hake allowed out of his mind the thought that this smelly, steamy room might be the last place he would ever see alive, and studied it. It was not exactly frightening, but it was paralyzing. Once again he could see no handle to grip his life by, nothing he could do to change his state.

When Leota had left, responding to three sharp raps on the door, she had gathered up bowl, tray, spoon and even the ice bag to take away. If she had left even so much as a table knife— But there was nothing like that. There was nothing in the room that was not either securely fastened down or harmless.

He wiped sweat from his face, stood up, pulled off his shirt, kicked off his shoes, and was still sweltering. He could not even tell whether it was day or night. The questioning and beating had seemed endless, but might really have been only for an hour or two; the brief sleep could have been minutes, or could have been anything. No light came through the sealed hatch over the portholes. He did not even know whether the little ship was moving or bobbing somewhere at anchor.

He threw his pants across one of the far bunks and stretched out. There was a quality that was almost satisfying about the total impotence of his position. As there was nothing at all he could do, he was permitted to do nothing. Even the faded pounding in his head, the tenderness of his face and the ache in his gut became only phenomena to be observed. He was very nearly at peace as he drowsed there, one arm behind his head, and he was amused to find that his impotence did not extend to all of his person. In all the time he had been talking to Leota one part of him had been very aware of her round, tanned legs and the gentle feminine smell that came from her. He could smell it now; and that, and perhaps the rocking of the boat, and perhaps some unidentified personality trait in the new Hake combined to make him want very much to make love. And when after a time Leota came in again, bearing fresh ice bag, water and aspirin, and the door was locked behind her and she sat on the edge of the bunk, he reached up toward her. Startled, she said, “Heeeeyyy—” And then, pulling her lips away from his, “At least let me put down the glass.” It was like making love in a dream, easy, unhurried and sure, and he was not even surprised to find that she was as ready as he.

When they were apart he traced the gentle edge of bone before her left hip with his fingers and said, “You know, I didn’t really expect this, but I’m awfully glad about it.” Their eyes were only inches apart, and she looked into his carefully, then kissed him, shook her head, sat up and glanced at her watch.

“Take your aspirin,” she said, “and then let’s talk. I’ve got twenty-five minutes left to turn you.”

“Turn me into what?” he asked, swallowing obediently.

“Turn you into a double agent, Horny,” she said.

He slid to the edge of the bunk and sat next to her. He brushed her bare shoulder with his lips thoughtfully. “Oh, yes,” he said. “My little problem.”

“It’s actually our problem, Horny. But that’s the deal they’ll give you. If you’ll work with them they’ll let you go. They’ve got a plan. They’re going to ransom you— exchange you for somebody the Team’s got hidden out in Texas. Don’t ask me who; I don’t know.”

Hake said consideringly, “I don’t really know how high a price the Team puts on me.”

She said, “Well, to be frank, Horny, the twins don’t really think it’s very high. They’ll let themselves be bargained down—of course, assuming that you go along. Otherwise there’s no deal for you. Or maybe for me, either,” she added. “If they, ah, dispose of you I really don’t think they will want me to be around as a possible witness to murder.”

That was a new thought, and a soberingly unwelcome one to Hake. He put his arm around her warm, damp waist, but she did not yield. “So we have to talk, Horny. I don’t think there ought to be any moral question for you. I can’t believe that you want to be loyal to a bunch of destructive lunatics. It’s not just the PCP, or bribing half the disk jockeys in Europe to play narco music, or counterfeiting the pound, or jiggering everybody’s computer nets. Or spreading disease, or insect pests, or allergenic weeds, or—”

“I didn’t know about the narco music,” Hake said. “And what’s that about the computers?”

“All the time, Horny. How do you think they finance themselves? Or, for that matter,” she added honestly, “how do you think I do? I’m not saying I really like the way my side operates. They spy on you, we spy on you. They trick you, I trick you.”

“I like the way you do it better,” he observed. “What do you mean, you spy on me? Is that how you knew I was going to the Team in the first place?”

“Certainly. We don’t have the resources the Team does,” she said bitterly, “but we do what we can. I have an old school friend who—no, never mind who she is. We don’t have time. I have to persuade you to turn around.”

“Oh,” said Hake, “I thought you knew that. I’m turned.”

She looked at him. “You’re sure?”

“Sure?” He laughed. “What I’m sure of is that I’m getting real tired of being used. But I’m willing to try it your way.”

She studied him carefully, then shook her head. “All right,” she said. “Now all we have to do is hope the Reddis don’t change their mind. And—” she glanced at her watch— “we still have twenty minutes.”

He pulled her toward him, but he had misunderstood her meaning. She resisted. “Wait a minute, Horny. Now it’s time for me to ask you the question.”

“What question?”

“The one I told you I was going to ask: Why did you do all this?”

He said peevishly, “I thought we’d just been over all that. I don’t know.”

“But maybe I do. I have a theory. Don’t laugh—”

He was a long way from laughing.

“I have to start from the beginning. What do you know about hypnotism?”

Hake took his arm away from her and said, “Leota, I’m not an impatient man, but if you’ve got a point I wish you’d get to it.”

“Well, that is the point. You act hypnotized. Do you understand what I’m saying? Whatever anybody tells you to do, you do. You’re suggestible. Just like someone in a hypnotic trance state.”

“Oh, hell.” He was exasperated. “I can’t be hypnotized to do things I wouldn’t do otherwise—that’s a fact! Everybody knows that.”

“They do? How do you know it? Have you made a study of hypnotism?”

“No, but—”

“No, but you sure as hell act as if you were! Don’t give me knee-jerks, Horny. Think about it.”

“Well—” He thought for a moment, and then said cautiously, “I admit that I don’t altogether understand what I’ve been doing the last couple of months. I’ve wondered about it. I went along with any lousy thing they suggested quick enough—as you point out.”

“I don’t mean it critically, Horny. The opposite of that. You couldn’t help yourself, if you were hypnotized.”

He looked at her. “How sure are you of any of this?”

“Well, not very,” she admitted. “But it makes sense, doesn’t it? Is there any other way to explain it? You can’t even call it reflex patriotism. You went along with me, too, when I told you not to report me.”

He looked up with a spasm of hope. “But—that was against the Team!”

Leota shook her head. “Men! That’s male ego for you. You’d rather believe you were a skunk of your own free will than a helpless dupe. But the fact is, that’s a strong sign of the trance state. It’s called a tolerance of incongruities. It means you act as though mutually conflicting things are both right, or both true.”

He protested, “It’s all impossible! They couldn’t hypnotize me without my remembering it!”

“How do you know that?”

“I don’t, but—”

She said, “It could have been a post-hypnotic suggestion to forget. Or you might not have been aware of it in the first place. They could have slipped you a drug. Planted a tape under your pillow. I don’t know. All I’m sure of—”

She was interrupted by the sound of the door being unlocked. The Reddi with the scar over his brow looked in on them, his right hand resting on the holster of a pistol. He smiled.

“Ah, I see you are making good progress, sweetie,” he observed as Leota grabbed for her beach dress and held it before her.

She said coldly: “We’ve made the deal, Rama. Now it’s up to you to work out an arrangement for a trade.”

“I see,” he said, studying them in amusement. “Yes, perhaps something can be done. When my brother returns we will speak further. But how can we know that Reverend Hake will keep his word to us?”

Neither Hake nor Leota answered; there was no obvious answer to give. The Indian nodded. “Yes, that is a difficulty. Well, I had thought that you might wish to come on deck, my dear, but perhaps you prefer to remain here?”

He smiled—it was almost a friendly smile, at least a tolerant one, Hake was astonished to discover—and closed the door behind him.

Hake and Leota looked at each other. Hake said, “Ah, about what he was saying. How do you suppose they’re going to make sure I keep my bargain?”

“I don’t have a clue, Horny, except that it probably will be in a way you don’t like. The easiest thing would be to kill you if you don’t. If the Team can plant somebody who can get at you when they want to, and I can, then it’s a real good bet that the Reddis can, too. Or it might be something a lot worse.”

“Such as?”

She said angrily, “The worst thing you can think of. Or worse than that, the worst thing either of them can think of. Addict you to a drug? Give you a fatal disease that they keep providing you the medicine for? I don’t know. They’ll think of something.”

The future began to look rather dubious to Hake. “But maybe it won’t be that bad,” she added, trying to reassure him. “There’s nothing you can do about it anyway, right? Whatever it is, it’s better than floating up on the docks of the Bay of Naples.”

“Why Naples? I thought we were around Capri?”

“You’d have to ask them why. Last I saw, we were tied up to some industrial dock. If you listen, you can hear trains in the freight yards.”

He listened, putting his arm around her again, but heard nothing he could identify. “Well,” he said, “as it looks like we still have some time—”

“Wait a minute, Horny.” She was still listening, with an expression of puzzlement. There was a faint, rapid patter of feet on the deck outside, and then something that was almost a splash.

She stood up, pulling the dress over her head. “Something’s going on,” she announced, and opened the door a crack. There was no one outside. “I’m going to take a look. You’d better stay here.”

“No. I’m coming too.”

“Then stay back.” She crossed to the deck door, which was slid fully open, and looked around. Hake came up behind her and peered over her shoulder. They were moored to ancient wood pilings, alongside a bulkhead. Greasy water lapped against the wood, and beyond the bulkhead were bulbous, immense tanks of some sort. It was night time, but the tanks were brightly lit, and around and among them Hake saw figures moving cautiously closer. There was no sign of either of the Reddis.

“Oh, Christ!” she whispered. “It looks like your boys are coming after you. Or, more likely, after the Reddis and me. Rama must’ve seen them and taken off!”

“What will happen to you?” Hake demanded.

“Nothing real good,” she said worriedly. “Hake, Fm going to get out of here. You stay. You’ll be okay. If you can, stall them.” She ran into the cabin and came out again, strapping the scuba tanks on hurriedly.

“Wait!” he protested. “I want to see you again!”

She paused for a second, regarding him. “Oh, Horny,” she said, “you are so bloody naive.” She kissed him hard and fast, and lowered herself over the far gunwale. Minutes later, when the first of the approaching men had reached the short gangplank, Hake came out of the cabin With his hands up.

“It’s me!” he cried. “Thank God you got here! They’ve all taken off that way, not more than five minutes ago—if you hurry you can catch them!” And he pointed down the waterfront toward the likeliest, darkest spot.