Shibumi

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-m

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—”

“Be

“—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 id

“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 ros

“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.