Château d’Etchebar

   After parking in the square of Etchebar (he did not permit automobiles on his property) and giving the roof a parting bash with his fist, Hel walked down the private road to his château feeling, as he always did upon returning home, a paternal affection for this perfect seventeenth-century house into which he had put years of devotion and millions of Swiss francs. It was the thing he loved most in the world, a physical and emotional fortress against the twentieth century. He paused along the path up from the heavy gates to pat the earth in around a newly planted shrub, and as he was doing this he felt the approach of that vague and scattered aura that could only be Pierre, his gardener.
   “Bonjour, M’sieur,” Pierre greeted in his singsong way, as he recognized Hel through the haze of his regularly spaced glasses of red that began with his rising at dawn.
   Hel nodded. “I hear we have a guest, Pierre.”
   “It is so. A girl. She still sleeps. The women have told me that she is a whore from—”
   “I know. Is Madame awake?”
   “To be sure. She was informed of your approach twenty minutes ago.” Pierre looked up into the sky and nodded sagely. “Ah, ah, ah,” he said, shaking his head. Hel realized that he was preparing to make a weather prediction, as he did every time they met on the grounds. All the Basque of Haute Soule believe they have special genetic gifts for meteorological prognostication based upon their mountain heritage and the many folk adages devoted to reading weather signs. Pierre’s own predictions, delivered with a quiet assurance that was never diminished by his unvarying inaccuracy, had constituted the principal topic of his conversation with M’sieur Hel for fifteen years, ever since the village drunk had been elevated to the rank of the outlander’s gardener and his official defender from village gossip.
   “Ah, M’sieur, there will be rain before this day is out,” Pierre chanted, nodding to himself with resigned conviction. “So there is no point in my setting out these flowers today.”
   “Is that so, Pierre?” How many hundreds of times had they had this conversation?
   “Yes, it is so. Last night at sunset there was red and gold in the little clouds near the mountains. It is a sure sign.”
   “Oh? But doesn’t the saying go the other way? Isn’t it arrats gorriak eguraldi?”
   “That is how the saying goes, M’sieur. However…” Pierre’s eyes glittered with conspiratorial slyness as he tapped the side of his long nose. “…everything depends on the phase of the moon.”
   “Oh?”
   Pierre closed his eyes and nodded slowly, smiling benevolently on the ignorance of all outlanders, even such basically good men as M’sieur Hel. “When the moon is ascending, the rule is as you have said; but when the moon is descending, it is the other way.”
   “I see. Then when the moon is descending it is: Goiz gorriak dakarke uri?”
   Pierre frowned, uncomfortable about being forced to a firm prediction. He considered for a moment before answering. “That varies, M’sieur.”
   “I’m sure it does.”
   “And… there is an additional complication.”
   “You’re going to tell me about it.”
   Pierre glanced about uneasily and shifted to French, to avoid the risk of offending the earth spirits who, of course, understand only Basque. “Vous voyez, M’sieur, de temps en temps, la lune se trompe!”
   Hel drew a long breath and shook his head. “Good morning, Pierre.”
   “Good morning, M’sieur.” Pierre tottered down the path to see if there was something else requiring his attention.


* * *

   His eyes closed and his mind afloat, Hel sat neckdeep in the Japanese wooden tub filled with water so hot that lowering himself into it had been an experience on the limen between pain and pleasure. The servants had fired up the wood-stoked water boiler as soon as they heard that M. Hel was approaching from Larrau, and by the time he had scrubbed himself thoroughly and taken a shock shower in icy water, his Japanese tub was full, and the small bathing room was billowing with dense steam.
   Hana dozed across from him, sitting on a higher bench that allowed her to sit neck-deep too. As always when they bathed together, their feet were in casual embrace.
   “Do you want to know about the visitor, Nicholai?”
   Hel shook his head slowly, not willing to interrupt his comatose relaxation. “Later,” he muttered.
   After a quarter of an hour, the water cooled enough that it was possible to make a movement in the tub without discomfort. He opened his eyes and smiled sleepily at Hana. “One grows old, my friend. After a couple of days in the mountains, the bath becomes more a medical necessity than a pleasure.”
   Hana smiled back and squeezed his foot between hers. “Was it a good cave?”
   He nodded. “An easy one, really. A walk-in cave with no long crawls, no siphons. Still, it was just about all the work my body could handle.”
   He climbed the steps on the side of the tub and slid back the padded panel that closed the bathing room off from the small Japanese garden he had been perfecting for the past fifteen years, and which he assumed would be acceptable in another fifteen. Steam billowed past him into the cool air, which felt bracing on his skin, still tight and tingling from the heat. He had learned that a hot tub, twenty minutes of light meditation, an hour of lovemaking, and a quick shower replenished his body and spirit better than a night’s sleep; and this routine was habitual with him upon returning from a caving bash or, in the old days, from a counterterrorist stunt.
   Hana left the tub and put a lightly padded kimono over her still-wet body. She helped him into his bathing kimono, and they walked across the garden, where he stopped for a moment to adjust a sounding stone in the stream leading from the small pond because the water was low and the sound of it was too treble to please him. The bathing room with its thick plank walls was half hidden in a stand of bamboo that bordered the garden on three sides. Across from it was a low structure of dark wood and sliding paper panels that contained his Japanese room, where he studied and meditated, and his “gun room,” where he kept the implements of the trade from which he had recently retired. The fourth side of the garden was closed off by the back of his château, and both of the Japanese buildings were freestanding, so as to avoid breaking the mansard perfection of its marble facade. He had worked through all of one summer, building the Japanese structures with two craftsmen he brought from Kyushu for the purpose, men old enough to remember how to work in wood-and-wedge.
   Kneeling at a low lacquered table, facing out toward the Japanese garden, they took a light meal of melon balls (warm, to accent the musky flavor), tart plums (glaucous, icy, and full of juice), unflavored rice cakes, and a half glass of chilled Irouléguy.
   The meal done, Hana rose from the table. “Shall I close the panels?”
   “Leave one ajar, so we can see the garden.”
   Hana smiled. Nicholai and his garden… like a father with a delicate but willful child. The garden was the most important of his possessions, and often, after a trip, he would return home unannounced, change clothes, and work in the garden for hours before anyone knew he was home. To him, the garden with its subtle articulations was a concrete statement of shibumi, and there was an autumnal correctness to the fact that he would probably not live to see its full statement.
   She let her kimono fall away. “Shall we have a wager?”
   He laughed. “All right. The winner receives… let’s see. How about one half-hour of the Delight of the Razor?”
   “Fine. I am sure I shall enjoy it very much.”
   “That sure of yourself?”
   “My good friend, you have been off in the mountains for three days. Your body has been manufacturing love, but there has been no outlet. You are at a great disadvantage in the wager.”
   “We shall see.”
   With Hana and Nicholai, the foreplay was as much mental as physical. They were both Stage IV lovemakers, she by virtue of her excellent training, he because of the mental control he had learned as a youth, and his gift of proximity sense, which allowed him to eavesdrop on his partner’s sensations and know precisely where she was in relation to climax contractions. The game was to cause the other to climax first, and it was played with no holds or techniques barred. To the winner went the Delight of the Razor, a deeply relaxing thrill massage in which the skin of the arms, legs, chest, back, stomach, and pubes is lightly brushed with a keenly honed razor. The tingling delight, and the background fear of a slip, combine to require the person receiving the massage to relax completely as the only alternative to unbearable tension and pleasure. Typically, the Delight of the Razor begins with the extremities, sweeping waves of thrill inward as the razor approaches the erogenous areas, which become ardent with pleasure and the shadow of fear. There are subtleties of technique when the razor comes to these zones that are dangerous to describe.
   The Delight of the Razor culminates in quick oral lovemaking.
   Whichever of them won the wager by making the other climax first would receive the Delight of the Razor, and there was a special cachet to their way of playing the game. They knew one another well enough to bring both of them to the threshold of climax quickly, and the game was played out there, on the teetering edge of pleasure and control.
   It was not until after he got away from Sugamo Prison and began his life in the West that Hel’s sexual experience took on form and articulation. Before that there had been only amateur play. His relationship with Mariko had not been physical in essence; it had been youthful affection, and their bungling sexual experiences had been nothing more than a physical footnote to their gentle and uncertain affection.
   With the Tanaka sisters, Hel entered Stage I lovemaking, that healthy and simplistic stage of sexual curiosity during which strong young animals brimming with the impulse to continue their species exercise themselves on one another’s bodies. Although plebeian and monotonic, Stage I is wholesome and honest, and Hel enjoyed his time spent in that rank, regretting only that so many people are sensationally crippled by their cultures and can accept the strong, sweaty lovemaking of Stage I only when disguised as romance, love, affection, or even self-expression. In their confusion, they build relationships upon the sand of passion. Hel considered it a great pity that mass man had come into contact with romantic literature, which created expectations beyond the likelihood of fulfillment and contributed to that marital delinquency characteristic of Western sexual adolescents.
   During his brief sojourn in Stage II—the use of sex as psychological aspirin, as social narcosis, a kind of bloodletting to reduce fevers and pressures—Hel began to have glimpses of the fourth level of sexual experience. Because he realized that sexual activity would be a significant part of his life, and because he detested amateurism in all its forms, he undertook to prepare himself. He received professional tactical training in Ceylon and in the exclusive bordellos of Madagascar, where he lived for four months, learning from women of every race and culture.
   Stage III, sexual gourmandizing, is the highest stage ever reached by Westerners and, indeed, by most Orientals. Hel moved through this stage leisurely and with high appetite because he was young, his body strong and taut, and his imagination fertile. He was in no danger of getting bogged down in the sexual black masses of artificial stimulation with which the nastier-than-thou jetsetters and the soft intellectuals of the literary and filmmaking worlds seek to compensate for callused nerve ends and imaginations by roiling among one another’s tepid flesh and lubricating fluids.
   Even while in the sexual smorgasbord of Stage III, Hel began to experiment with such refined tactics as climax hovering and mental intercourse. He found it amusing to associate sexual techniques with Gô nomenclature. Such terms as aji keshi, ko, furikawari and hane lent themselves easily as illuminating images; while others, such as kaketsugi, nozoki, and yosu-miru, could be applied to lovemaking only with a liberal and procrustean view of metaphor.
   By the age of thirty, Hel’s sexual interests and capacities led him naturally to Stage IV, the final “game phase,” in which excitation and climax are relatively trivial terminal gestures in an activity that demands all the mental vigor and reserve of championship Gô, the training of a Ceylonese whore, and the endurance and agility of a gifted grade VI rock climber. The game of his preference was an invention of his own which he called “kikashi sex.” This could only be played with another Stage IV lovemaker, and only when both were feeling particularly strong. The game was played in a small room, about six tatami. Both players dressed in formal kimonos and knelt facing one another, their backs against opposite walls. Each, through concentration alone, was required to come to the verge of climax and to hover there. No contact was permitted, only concentration and such gestures as could be made with one hand.
   The object of the game was to cause climax before climaxing yourself, and it was best played while it was raining.
   In time, he abandoned kikashi sex as being somewhat too demanding, and also because it was a lonely and selfish experience, lacking the affection and caressing of afterplay that decorates the best of lovemaking.


* * *

   Hana’s eyes were squeezed shut with effort, and her lips were stretched over her teeth. She tried to escape from the involute position in which he held her, but he would not release her.
   “I thought we agreed that you weren’t permitted to do that!” she pled.
   “I didn’t agree to anything.”
   “Oh, Nikko… I can’t!… I can’t hold on! Damn you!”
   She arched her back and emitted a squeak of final effort to avoid climaxing.
   Her delight infected Hel, who relinquished his control to allow himself to climax just after she did. Then suddenly his proximity sense sounded the alarm. She was faking! Her aura was not dancing, as it would at climax. He tried to void his mind and arrest his climax, but it was too late. He had broken over the rim of control.
   “You devil!” he shouted as he came.
   She was laughing as she climaxed a few seconds later.

* * *

   She lay on her stomach, humming sleepily in appreciation as he slowly inched the razor over her buttock, a perfect object blending the fineness of her Japanese blood with the useful shape of her Black. He kissed it gently and continued the Delight.
   “In two months your tenure with me is over, Hana.”
   “Hmm-hmm.” She did not want to break her languor by speaking.
   “Have you considered my suggestion that you stay on with me?”
   “Hmm-hmm.”
   “And?”
   “Unh-nh-nh-nh-nh.” The prolonged sound through slack lips meant, “Don’t make me talk.”
   He chuckled and turned her over onto her back, continuing the thrill massage with close attention to technique and detail. Hana was in a perfect state. She was in her midthirties, the youngest a woman can be and still possess the training and experience of a grand lover. Because of the excellent care she took of her body and because of the time-annihilating effects of her ideal blend of Oriental, Black, and Caucasian strains, she would be in her prime for another fifteen years. She was a delight to look at, and to work on. Her greatest quality lay in her ability to receive pleasure completely and graciously.
   When the Delight of the Razor had closed to her centers and had rendered her moist and passive, he concluded the event with its classic quick finish. And for a time they lay together in that comfortable lover’s twine that knows how to deal with the extra arm.
   “I have thought about staying on, Nikko,” she said, her voice buzzing against his chest. “There are many reasons that might prompt me to do so. This is the most beautiful spot in the world. I shall always be grateful to you for showing me this corner of the Basque country. And certainly you have constructed a life of shibumi luxury here that is attractive. And there is you, so quiet and stern when you deal with the outside world, so boyish in lovemaking. You are not without a certain charm.”
   “Thank you.”
   “And I must also confess that it is much rarer to find a well-trained man than an accomplished woman. But… it is lonely here. I know that I am free to go to Bayonne or Paris whenever I wish—and I have a good time when I do go—but day to day, despite your attention and the delights of your conversation, and despite the bawdy energy of our friend Le Cagot, it is lonely for a woman whose interests and appetites have been so closely honed as mine have been.”
   “I understand that.”
   “It is different for you, Nikko. You are a recluse by nature. You despise the outside world, and you don’t need it. I too find that most of the people out there either bore or annoy me. But I am not a recluse by nature, and I have a vivid curiosity. Then too… there is another problem.”
   “Yes?”
   “Well, how shall I put this? Personalities such as yours and mine are meant to dominate. Each of us should function in a large society, giving flavor and texture to the mass. The two of us together in one place is like a wasteful concentration of spice in the course of an otherwise bland meal. Do you see what I mean?”
   “Does that mean that you have decided to leave when your tenure is up?”
   She blew a jet of breath over the hairs of his chest. “It means that I have not yet made up my mind.” She was silent for a time, then she said, “I suppose I would really prefer to have the best of both worlds, spending half of every year here, resting and learning with you, and half of each year out there, stunning my audience.”
   “I see nothing wrong with that.”
   She laughed, “It would mean that you would have to make do for six months each year with the bronzed, long-legged, mindless nymphs of the Côte Basque. Actresses and models and that sort. Could you do that?”
   “As easily as you could make do with round-armed lads possessing excellent muscle tone and honest, empty eyes. For both of us, it would be like subsisting on hors d’oeuvres. But why not? There is some amusement in hors d’oeuvres, though they cloy without nourishing.”
   “Let me think about it, Nikko. It is an attractive idea.” She raised herself onto one elbow and looked down into his half-closed, amused eyes. “Then too, freedom is also attractive. Maybe I won’t make any decision at all.”
   “That’s a kind of decision.”
   They dressed and went to shower beneath the perforated copper cask designed for the purpose by the first enlightened owner of the château nearly three hundred years before.
   It was not until they were taking tea in the cream-and-gold east salon that Hel asked about the visitor.
   “She is still asleep. When she arrived yesterday evening, she was desperate. She had walked from the village after flying in to Pau from Rome and hitchhiking to Tardets. Although she tried to chat and follow the forms of politeness, I could tell from the first that she was very distraught. She began weeping while she was taking tea. Weeping without knowing she was doing it. I gave her something to calm her and put her to bed. But she awoke during the night with nightmares, and I sat on the edge of her bed, stroking her hair and humming to her, until she was calm and dropped off again.”
   “What is her problem?”
   “She talked about it while I stroked her hair. There was a nasty business at the airport in Rome. Two of her friends were shot and killed.”
   “Shot by whom?”
   “She didn’t say. Perhaps she didn’t know.”
   “Why were they shot?”
   “I have no idea.”
   “Did she tell you why she came to our home?”
   “Evidently all three of them were on their way here. She had no money, only her plane ticket.”
   “Did she give you her name?”
   “Yes. Hannah Stern. She said her uncle was a friend of yours.”
   Hel set his cup down, closed his eyes, and pushed out a long nasal sigh. “Asa Stern was a friend. He’s dead. I am indebted to him. There was a moment when, without his help, I would have died.”
   “And this indebtedness, does it extend to the girl as well?”
   “We’ll see. Did you say the blow-away in Rome International happened yesterday afternoon?”
   “Or morning. I am not sure which.”
   “Then it should be on the news at noon. When the girl wakes up, please have her come and see me. I’ll be in the garden. Oh, and I think Le Cagot will take dinner with us—if he finishes his business in Larrau in time.”
   Hel worked in the garden for an hour and a half, trimming, controlling, striving for modest and subtle effects. He was not an artist, but he was sensitive; so while his garden, the major statement of his impulse to create, lacked sabi, it had the shibui features that separate Japanese art from the mechanical dynamics of Western art and the florid hyperbole of Chinese. There was that sweet melancholy, that forgiving sadness that characterizes the beautiful in the Japanese mind. There was intentional imperfection and organic simplicity that created, then satisfied, aesthetic tensions, functioning rather as balance and imbalance function in Western art.
   Just before noon, a servant brought out a battery radio, and Hel listened in his gun room for the twelve o’clock broadcast of BBC World Service. The news reader was a woman whose distinctive voice has been a source of amusement for the international Anglophone community for years. To that peculiar pronunciation that is BBC’s own, she adds a clipped, half-strangled sound which the world audience has long taken to be the effect of an uncomfortable suppository, although there is lively dispute and extensive wagering between those who maintain that the suppository is made of sandpaper and those who promote the ice-cube theory.
   Buried among the trivia of collapsing governments, the falling dollar, and Belfast bombings was a description of the atrocity at Rome International. Two Japanese men, subsequently identified from papers on their persons as Red Army members working in behalf of the Black Septembrists, opened fire with automatic weapons, killing two young Israeli men, whose identities are being withheld. The Red Army assassins were themselves killed in an exchange of gunfire with Italian police and special agents, as were several civilian bystanders. And now for news of a lighter note…
   “Mr. Hel?”
   He switched off the radio and beckoned to the young woman standing in the doorway of the gun room. She was wearing fresh khaki walking shorts and a shortsleeved shirt with three top buttons open. As hors d’oeuvres go, she was a promising morsel: long strong legs, slim waist, aggressive bosom, reddish hair fluffy from recent washing. More soubrette than heroine, she was in that brief desirable moment between coltishness and zaftig. But her face was soft and without lines of experience, giving the strain she was under the look of petulance.
   “Mr. Hel?” she said again, her tone uncertain.
   “Come in and sit down, Miss Stern.”
   She look a chair beneath a rack of metal devices she did not recognize to be weapons and smiled faintly. “I don’t know why, but I thought of you as an older man. Uncle Asa spoke of you as a friend, a man of his own age.”
   “We were of an age; we shared an era. Not that that’s pertinent to anything.” He looked at her flatly, evaluating her. And finding her wanting.
   Uncomfortable under the expressionless gaze of his bottle-green eyes, she sought the haven of small talk. “Your wife—Hana, that is—has been very kind to me. She sat up with me last night and—”
   He cut her off with a gesture. “Begin by telling me about your uncle. Why he sent you here. After that, give me the details of the events at Rome International. Then tell me what your plans are and what they have to do with me.”
   Surprised by his businesslike tone, she took a deep breath, gathered her thoughts, and began her story, characteristically enough, with herself. She told him that she had been raised in Skokie, had attended Northwestern University, had taken an active interest in political and social issues, and had decided upon graduation to visit her uncle in Israel—to find her roots, discover her Jewishness.
   Hel’s eyelids drooped at this last, and he breathed a short sigh. With a rolling motion of his hand he gestured her to get on with it.
   “You knew, of course, that Uncle Asa was committed to punishing those who committed the Munich murders.”
   “That was on the grapevine. We never spoke of such things in our letters. When I first heard of it, I thought your uncle was foolish to come out of retirement and attempt something like that with his old friends and contacts either gone or decayed into politics. I could only assume it was the desperate act of a man who knew he was in his final illness.”
   “But he first organized our cell a year and a half ago, and he didn’t become sick until a few months ago.”
   “That is not true. Your uncle has been ill for several years. There were two brief remissions. At the time you say he organized your cell, he was combating pain with drugs. That might account for his crepuscular thinking.”
   Hannah Stern frowned and looked away. “You don’t sound as though you held my uncle in much esteem.”
   “On the contrary, I liked him very much. He was a brilliant thinker and a man of generous spirit—a man of shibumi.”
   “A man of… what?”
   “Never mind. Your uncle never belonged in the business of terror. He was emotionally unequipped for it—which of course says a good deal in his favor as a human being. In happier times, he would have lived the gentle life of a teacher and scholar. But he was passionate in his sense of justice, and not only for his own people. The way things were twenty-five years ago, in what is now Israel, passionate and generous men who were not cowards had few options open to them.”
   Hannah was not used to Hel’s soft, almost whispered prison voice, and she found herself leaning close to hear his words.
   “You are wrong to imagine that I did not esteem your uncle. There was a moment in Cairo sixteen years ago when he risked his safety, possibly his life, to help me. What is more significant, he also risked the success of a project he was devoted to. I had been shot in the side. The situation was such that I could not seek medical assistance. When I met him, I had gone two days with a wad of blood-soaked cloth under my shirt, wandering in the back streets because I didn’t dare try a hotel. I was dazed with fever. No, I esteem him a great deal. And I am in his debt.” Hel had said this in a soft monotone, without the histrionics she would have associated with sincerity. He told her these things because he thought that, in fairness to the uncle, she had a right to know the extent of his debt of honor. “Your uncle and I never met again after that business in Cairo. Our friendship grew through years of exchanging letters that both of us used as outlets for testing ideas, for sharing our attitudes toward books we were reading, for complaining about fate and life. We enjoyed that freedom from embarrassment one only finds in talking to a stranger. We were very close strangers.” Hel wondered if this young woman could understand such a relationship. Deciding she could not, he focused in on the business at hand. “All right, after his son was killed in Munich, your uncle formed a cell to aid him in his mission of punishment. How many people, and where are they now?”
   “I am the only one left.”
   “You were within the cell?”
   “Yes. Why? Does that seem—”
   “Never mind.” Hel was convinced now that Asa Stern had been acting in dazed desperation, to introduce this soft college liberal into an action cell. “How large was the cell?”
   “We were five. We called ourselves the Munich Five.”
   His eyelids drooped again. “How theatrical. Nothing like telegraphing the stunt.”
   “I beg your pardon?”
   “Five in the cell? Your uncle, you, the two hit in Rome—who was the fifth member? David O. Selznik?”
   “I don’t understand what you mean. The fifth man was killed in a café bombing in Jerusalem. He and I were… we were…” Her eyes began to shine with tears.
   “I’m sure you were. It’s a variation of the summer vacation romance: one of the fringe benefits of being a committed young revolutionary with all humanity as your personal flock. All right, tell me how far you had got before Asa died.”
   Hannah was confused and hurt. This was nothing like the man her uncle had described, the honest professional who was also a gentle man of culture, who paid his debts and refused to work for the uglier of the national and commercial powers. How could her uncle have been fond of a man who showed so little human sympathy? Who was so lacking in understanding?
   Hel, of course, understood only too well. He had several times had to clean up after these devoted amateurs. He knew that when the storm broke, they either ran or, from equally cowardly impulses, shot up everything in sight.
   Hannah was surprised to find that no tears came, their flow cauterized by Hel’s cold adherence to fact and information. She sniffed and said, “Uncle Asa had sources of information in England. He learned that the last remaining two of the Munich murderers were with a group of Black Septembrists planning to hijack a plane departing from Heathrow.”
   “How large a group?”
   “Five or six. We were never sure.”
   “Had you identified which of them were involved in Munich?”
   “No.”
   “So you were going to put all five of them under?”
   She nodded.
   “I see. And your contacts in England? What is their character and what are they going to do for you?”
   “They are urban guerrillas working for the freedom of Northern Ireland from English domination.”
   “Oh, God.”
   “There is a kind of brotherhood among all freedom fighters, you know. Our tactics may be different, but our ultimate goals are the same. We all look forward to a day when—”
   “Please,” he interrupted. “Now, what were these IRA’s going to do for you?”
   “Well… they were keeping watch on the Septembrists. They were going to house us when we arrived in London. And they were going to furnish us with arms.”
   “‘Us’ being you and the two who got hit in Rome?”
   “Yes.”
   “I see. All right, now tell me what happened in Rome. EEC identifies the stuntmen as Japanese Red Army types acting for the PLO. Is that correct?”
   “I don’t know.”
   “Weren’t you there?”
   “Yes! I was there!” She controlled herself. “But in the confusion… people dying… gunfire all around me…” In her distress, she rose and turned her back on this man she felt was intentionally tormenting her, testing her. She told herself that she mustn’t cry, but tears came nonetheless. “I’m sorry. I was terrified. Stunned. I don’t remember everything.” Nervous and lacking something to do with her hands, she reached out to take a simple metal tube from the rack on the wall before her.
   “Don’t touch that!”
   She jerked her hand away, startled to hear him raise his voice for the first time. A shot of righteous anger surged through her. “I wasn’t going to hurt your toys!”
   “They might hurt you.” His voice was quiet and modulated again. “That is a nerve gas tube. If you had turned the bottom half, you would be dead now. And what is more important, so would I.”
   She grimaced and retreated from the weapons rack, crossing to the open sliding door leading to the garden, where she leaned against the sill to regain something of her composure.
   “Young woman, I intend to help you, if that is possible. I must confess that it may not be possible. Your little amateur organization has made every conceivable mistake, not the least of which was aligning yourselves with IRA dummies. Still, I owe it to your uncle to hear you out. Perhaps I can protect you and get you back to the bourgeois comfort of your home, where you can express your social passions by campaigning against litter in national parks. But if I am to help you at all, I have to know how the stones lie on the board. So I want you to save your passion and theatrics for your memoirs and answer my questions as fully and as succinctly as you can. If you’re not prepared to do that just now, we can chat again later. But it is possible that I may have to move quickly. Typically in patterns like this, after a spoiling raid (and that’s probably what the Rome International number was) time favors the other fellows. Shall we talk now, or shall we go take luncheon?”
   Hannah slid down to the tatami floor, her back against the sill, her profile cameoed against the sunlit garden. After a moment, she said, “I’m sorry. I’ve been through a lot.”
   “I don’t doubt that. Now tell me about the Rome hit. Facts and impressions, not emotions.”
   She looked down and drew little circles on her tanned thigh with her fingernail, then she pulled up her knees and hugged them to her breast. “All right. Avrim and Chaim went through passport check ahead of me. I was slowed down by the Italian officer, who was sort of flirting and ogling my breasts. I suppose I should have kept my shirt buttoned all the way up. Finally, he stamped my passport, and, I started out into the terminal. Then the gunshots broke out. I saw Avrim run… and fall… the side of his head all… all. Wait a minute.” She sniffed and drew several deep, controlling breaths. “I started to run too… everyone was running and screaming… an old man with a white beard was hit… a child… a fat old woman. Then there were gunshots coming from the other side of the terminal and from the overhanging mezzanine, and the Oriental gunmen were hit. Then suddenly there was no more gunfire, only screams, and people all around, bleeding and hurt. I saw Chaim lying against the lockers, his legs all wrong and crooked. He had been shot in the face. So I… I just walked away. I just walked away. I didn’t know what I was doing, where I was going. Then I heard the announcement on the loudspeaker for the plane for Pau. And I just kept walking straight ahead until I came to the departure gate. And… and that’s all.”

   “All right. That’s fine. Now tell me this. Were you a target?”
   “What?”
   “Was anyone shooting specifically at you?”
   “I don’t know! How could I know?”
   “Were the Japanese using automatic weapons?”
   “What?”
   “Did they go rat-a-tat, or bang! bang! bang!”
   She looked up at him sharply. “I know what an automatic weapon is! We used to practice with them out in the mountains!”
   “Rat-a-tat or bang bang?”
   “They were machine guns.”
   “And did anyone standing close to you go down?”
   She thought hard, squeezing her knees to her lips. “No. No one standing close to me.”
   “If professionals using automatic weapons didn’t drop anyone near you, then you were not a target. It is possible they didn’t identify you as being with your two friends. Particularly as you left the check-through line some time after them. All right, please turn your mind to the shots that came from the mezzanine and blew away the Japanese hitmen. What can you tell me about them?”
   She shook her head. “Nothing. I don’t remember anything. The guns were not automatics.” She looked at Hel obliquely. “They went bang bang.”
   He smiled. “That’s the way. Humor and anger are more useful just now than the wetter emotions. Now, the radio report said something about ‘special agents’ being with the Italian police. Can you tell me anything about them?”
   “No. I never saw the people firing from the mezzanine.”
   Hel nodded and bowed his head, his palms pressed together and the forefingers lightly touching his lips. “Give me a moment to put this together.” He fixed his eyes on the weave pattern of the tatami, then defocused as he reviewed the information in hand.
   Hannah sat on the floor, framed in the doorway, and gazed out on the Japanese garden where sunlight reflected from the small stream glittered through bamboo leaves. Typical of her class and culture, she lacked the inner resources necessary to deal with the delights of silence, and soon she was uncomfortable. “Why aren’t there any flowers in your…”
   He lifted his hand to silence her without looking up.
   Four minutes later he raised his head. “What?”
   “Pardon me?”
   “Something about flowers.”
   “Oh, nothing important. I just wondered why you didn’t have any flowers in your garden.”
   “There are three flowers.”
   “Three varieties?”
   “No. Three flowers. One to signal each of the seasons of bloom. We are between seasons now. All right, let’s see what we know or can assume. It’s pretty obvious that the raid in Rome was organized either by PLO or by the Septembrists, and that they had learned of your intentions—probably through your London-based IRA comrades, who would sell their mothers into Turkish seraglios if the price was right (and if any self-respecting Turk would use them). The appearance of Japanese Red Army fanatics would seem to point to Septembrists, who often use others to do their dangerous work, having little appetite for personal risk. But things get a little complicated at this point. The stunt men were disposed of within seconds, and by men stationed in the mezzanine. Probably not Italian police, because the thing was done efficiently. The best bet is that the tip-off was tipped off. Why? The only reason that comes quickly to mind is that no one wanted the Japanese stunt men taken alive. And why? Possibly because they were not Red Army dum-dums at all. And that, of course, would bring us to CIA. Or to the Mother Company, which controls CIA, and everything else in American government, for that matter.”
   “What is the Mother Company? I’ve never heard of them.”
   “Few Americans have. It is a control organization of the principal international oil and energy companies. They’ve been in bed with the Arabs forever, using those poor benighted bastards as pawns in their schemes of induced shortages and profiteering. The Mother Company is a wiry opponent; they can’t be got at through nationalistic pressures. Although they put up a huge media front of being loyal American (or British or German or Dutch) companies, they are in fact international infragovernments whose only patriotism is profit. Chances are that your father owns stock in them, as do half the dear gray-haired ladies of your country.”
   Hannah shook her head. “I can’t feature CIA taking sides with the Black Septembrists. The United States supports Israel; they’re allies.”
   “You underestimate the elastic nature of your country’s conscience. They have made a palpable shift since the oil embargo. American devotion to honor varies inversely with its concern for central heating. It is a property of the American that he can be brave and selfsacrificing only in short bursts. That is why they are better at war than at responsible peace. They can face danger, but not inconvenience. They toxify their air to kill mosquitoes. They drain their energy sources to provide themselves with electric carving knives. We must never forget that there was always Coca-Cola for the soldiers in Viet Nam—”
   Hannah felt a chauvinistic sting. “Do you think its fine to generalize like that about a people?”
   “Yes. Generalization is flawed thinking only when applied to individuals. It is the most accurate way to describe the mass, the Wad. And yours is a democracy, a dictatorship of the Wad.”
   “I refuse to believe that Americans were involved in the blood and horror of what went on in that airport. Innocent children and old men…”
   “Does the sixth of August mean anything to you?”
   “Sixth of August? No. Why?” She gripped her legs closer to her chest.
   “Never mind.” Hel rose. “I have to think this out a bit. We’ll talk again this afternoon.”
   “Do you intend to help me?”
   “Probably. But probably not in any style you have in mind. By the way, can you stand a bit of avuncular advice?”
   “What would that be?”
   “It is a sartorial indiscretion for a young lady so lavishly endowed with pubic hair as you to wear shorts that brief, and to sit in so revealing a posture. Unless, of course, it is your intention to prove that your red hair is natural. Shall we take lunch?”
   Lunch was set at a small round table in the west reception room giving out onto the rolling green and allée that descended to the principal gates. The porte fenêtres were open, and the long curtains billowed lazily with cedar-scented breezes. Hana had changed to a long dress of plum-colored silk, and when Hel and Hannah entered, she smiled at them as she put the finishing touches to a centerpiece of delicate bell-shaped flowers. “What perfect timing. Lunch was just this minute set.” In fact, she had been awaiting them for ten minutes, but one of her charms was making others feel socially graceful. A glance at Hannah’s face told her that things had gone distressingly for her during the chat with Hel, so Hana took the burden of civilized conversation upon herself.
   As Hannah opened her starched linen napkin, she noticed that she had not been served the same things as Hana and Hel. She had a bit of lamb, chilled asparagus in mayonnaise, and rice pilaf, while they had fresh or lightly sautéed vegetables with plain brown rice.
   Hana smiled and explained. “Our age and past indiscretions require that we eat a little cautiously, my dear. But we do not inflict our Spartan regimen on our guests. In fact, when I am away from home, in Paris for instance, I go on a spree of depraved eating. Eating for me is what you might call a managed vice. A vice particularly difficult to control when one is living in France where, depending on your point of view, the food is either the world’s second best or the world’s very worst.”
   “What do you mean?” Hannah asked.
   “From a sybaritic point of view, French food is second only to classic Chinese cuisine. But it is so handled, and sauced, and prodded, and chopped, and stuffed, and seasoned as to be a nutritive disaster. That is why no people in the West have so much delight with eating as the French, or so much trouble with their livers.”
   “And what do you think about American food?” Hannah asked, a wry expression on her face, because she was of that common kind of American abroad who seeks to imply sophistication by degrading everything American.
   “I couldn’t really say; I have never been in America. But Nicholai lived there for a time, and he tells me that there are certain areas in which American cooking excels.”
   “Oh?” Hannah said, looking archly at Hel. “I’m surprised to hear that Mr. Hel has anything good to say about America or Americans.”
   “It’s not Americans I find annoying; it’s Americanism: a social disease of the postindustrial world that must inevitably infect each of the mercantile nations in turn, and is called ‘American’ only because your nation is the most advanced case of the malady, much as one speaks of Spanish flu, or Japanese Type-B encephalitis. Its symptoms are a loss of work ethic, a shrinking of inner resources, and a constant need for external stimulation, followed by spiritual decay and moral narcosis. You can recognize the victim by his constant efforts to get in touch with himself, to believe his spiritual feebleness is an interesting psychological warp, to construe his fleeing from responsibility as evidence that he and his life are uniquely open to new experience. In the latter stages, the sufferer is reduced to seeking that most trivial of human activities: fun. As for your food, no one denies that the Americans excel in one narrow rubric: the snack. And I suspect there’s something symbolic in that.”
   Hana disapproved of Hel’s ingracious tone, so she took control of the dinner talk as she brought Hannah’s plate to the sideboard to replenish it. “My English is imperfect. There is more than one asparagus here, but the word ‘asparaguses’ sounds awkward. Is it one of those odd Latin plurals, Nicholai? Does one say asperagae, or something like that?”
   “One would say that only if he were that overinformed/undereducated type who attends concerti for celli and afterward orders cups of capuccini. Or, if he is American, dishes of raspberry Jell-I.”
   “Arrêtes un peu et sois sage,” Hana said with a slight shake of her head. She smiled at Hannah. “Isn’t he a bore on the subject of Americans? It’s a flaw in his personality. His sole flaw, he assures me. I’ve been wanting to ask you, Hannah, what did you read at university?”
   “What did I read?”
   “What did you major in,” Hel clarified.
   “Oh. Sociology.”
   He might have guessed it. Sociology, that descriptive pseudo-science that disguises its uncertainties in statistical mists as it battens on the narrow gap of information between psychology and anthropology. The kind of non-major that so many Americans use to justify their four-year intellectual vacations designed to prolong adolescence.
   “What did you study in school?” Hannah asked her hostess thoughtlessly.
   Hana smiled to herself. “Oh… informal psychology, anatomy, aesthetics—that sort of thing.”
   Hannah applied herself to the asparagus, asking casually, “You two aren’t married, are you? I mean… you joked the other night about being Mr. Hel’s concubine.”
   Hana’s eyes widened in rare astonishment. She was not accustomed to that inquisitive social gaucherie that Anglo-Saxon cultures mistake for admirable frankness. Hel opened his palm toward Hana, gesturing her to answer, his eyes wide with mischievous innocence.
   “Well…” Hana said, “…in fact, Mr. Hel and I are not married. And in fact I am his concubine. Will you take dessert now? We have just received our first shipment of the magnificent cherries of Itxassou, of which the Basque are justly proud.”
   Hel knew Hana was not going to get off that easily, and he grinned at her as Miss Stern pursued, “I don’t think you mean concubine. In English, concubine means someone who is hired for… well, for her sexual services. I think you mean ‘mistress.’ And even mistress is sort of old-fashioned. Nowadays people just say they are living together.”
   Hana looked at Hel for help. He laughed and interceded for her. “Hana’s English is really quite good. She was only joking about the asparagus. She knows the difference among a mistress, a concubine, and a wife. A mistress is unsure of her wage, a wife has none; and they are both amateurs. Now, do try the cherries.”


* * *

   Hel sat on a stone bench in the middle of the cutting gardens, his eyes closed and his face lifted to the sky. Although the mountain breeze was cool, the thin sunlight penetrated his yukata and made him warm and drowsy. He hovered on the delicious verge of napping until he intercepted the approaching aura of someone who was troubled and tense.
   “Sit down, Miss Stern,” he said, without opening his eyes. “I must compliment you on the way you conducted yourself at lunch. Not once did you refer to your problems, seeming to sense that in this house we don’t bring the world to our table. To be truthful, I hadn’t expected such good form from you. Most people of your age and class are so wrapped up in themselves—so concerned with what they’re ‘into’—that they fail to realize that style and form are everything, and substance a passing myth.” He opened his eyes and smiled as he made a pallid effort to imitate the American accent: “It ain’t what you do, it’s how you do it.”
   Hannah perched on the marble balustrade before him, her thighs flattened by her weight. She was barefoot, and she had not heeded his advice about changing into less revealing clothes. “You said we should talk some more?”
   “Hm-m-m. Yes. But first let me apologize for my uncivil tone, both during our little chat and at lunch. I was angry and annoyed. I have been retired for almost two years now, Miss Stern. I am no longer in the profession of exterminating terrorists; I now devote myself to gardening, to caving, to listening to the grass grow, and to seeking a kind of deep peace I lost many years ago—lost because circumstances filled me with hate and fury. And then you come along with a legitimate claim to my assistance because of my debt to your uncle, and you threaten me with being pressed back into my profession of violence and fear. And fear is a good part of why I was annoyed with you. There is a certain amount of antichance in my work. No matter how well-trained one is, how careful, how coolheaded, the odds regularly build up over the years; and there comes a time when luck and antichance weigh heavily against you. It’s not that I’ve been lucky in my work—I mistrust luck—but I have never been greatly hampered by bad luck. So there’s a lot of bad luck out there waiting for its turn. I’ve tossed up the coin many times, and it has come down heads. There are more than twenty years’ worth of tails waiting their turn. So! What I wanted to explain was the reason I have been impolite to you. It’s fear mostly. And some annoyance. I’ve had time to consider now. I think I know what I should do. Fortunately, the proper action is also the safest.”
   “Does that mean you don’t intend to help me?”

   “On the contrary. I am going to help you by sending you home. My debt to your uncle extends to you, since he sent you to me; but it does not extend to any abstract notion of revenge or to any organization with which you are allied.”
   She frowned and looked away, out toward the mountains. “Your view of the debt to my uncle is a convenient one for you.”
   “So it turns out, yes.”
   “But… my uncle gave the last years of his life to hunting down those killers, and it would make that all pretty pointless if I didn’t try to do something.”
   “There’s nothing you can do. You lack the training, the skill, the organization. You didn’t even have a plan worthy of the name.”
   “Yes, we did.”
   He smiled, “All right. Let’s take a look at your plan. You said that the Black Septembrists were intending to hijack a plane from Heathrow. Presumably your group was going to hit them at that time. Were you going to take them on the plane, or before they boarded?”
   “I don’t know.”
   “You don’t know?”
   “Avrim was the leader after Uncle Asa died. He told us no more than he thought we had to know, in case one of us was captured or something like that. But I don’t believe we were going to meet them on the plane. I think we were going to execute them in the terminal.”
   “And when was this to take place?”
   “The morning of the seventeenth.”
   “That’s six days away. Why were you going to London so soon? Why expose yourself for six days?”
   “We weren’t going to London. We were coming here. Uncle Asa knew we didn’t have much chance of success without him. He had hoped he would be strong enough to accompany us and lead us. The end came too fast for him.”
   “So he sent you here? I don’t believe that.”
   “He didn’t exactly send us here. He had mentioned you several times. He said that if we got into trouble we could come to you and you would help.”
   “I’m sure he meant that I would help you get away after the event.”
   She shrugged.
   He sighed. “So you three youngsters were going to pick up your arms from your IRA contacts in London, loiter around town for six days, take a taxi out to Heathrow, stroll into the terminal, locate the targets in the waiting area, and blow them away. Was that your plan?”
   Her jaw tightened, and she looked away. It did sound silly, put like that.
   “So, Miss Stern, notwithstanding your disgust and horror over the incident at Rome International, it turns out that you were planning to be responsible for the same kind of messy business—a stand-up blow-away in a crowded waiting room. Children, old women, and bits thereof flying hither and yon as the dedicated young revolutionaries, eyes flashing and hair floating, shoot their way into history. Is that what you had in mind?”
   “If you’re trying to say we are no different from those killers who murdered young athletes in Munich or who shot my comrades in Rome—!”
   “The differences are obvious! They were well organized and professional!” He cut himself off short. “I’m sorry. Tell me this: what are your resources?”
   “Resources?”
   “Yes. Forgetting your IRA contacts—and I think we can safely forget them—what kind of resources were you relying on? Were the boys killed in Rome well trained?”
   “Avrim was. I don’t think Chaim had ever been involved in this sort of thing before.”
   “And money?”
   “Money? Well, we were hoping to get some from you. We didn’t need all that much. We had hoped to stay here for a few days—talk to you and get advice and instructions. Then fly directly to London, arriving the day before the operation. All we needed was air fare and a little more.”
   Hel closed his eyes. “My dear, dumb, lethal girl. If I were to undertake something like you people had in mind, it would cost between a hundred and a hundred-fifty-thousand dollars. And I am not speaking of my fee. That would be only the setup money. It costs a lot to get in, and often even more to get out. Your uncle knew that.” He looked out over the horizon line of mountain and sky. “I’m coming to realize that what he had put together was a suicide raid.”
   “I don’t believe that! He would never lead us into suicide without telling us!”
   “He probably didn’t intend to have you up front. Chances are he was going to use you three children as backups, hoping he could do the number himself, and you three would be able to walk away in the confusion. Then too…”
   “Then too, what?”
   “Well, we have to realize that he had been on drugs for a long time to manage his pain. Who knows what he was thinking; who knows how much he had left to think with toward the end?”
   She drew up one knee and hugged it to her chest, revealing again her erubescence. She pressed her lips against her knee and stared over the top of it across the garden, “I don’t know what to do.”
   Hel looked at her through half-closed eyes. Poor befuddled twit, seeking purpose and excitement in life, when her culture and background condemned her to mating with merchants and giving birth to advertising executives. She was frightened and confused, and not quite ready to give up her affair with danger and significance and return to a life of plans and possessions. “You really don’t have much choice. You’ll have to go home. I shall be delighted to pay your way.”
   “I can’t do that.”
   “You can’t do anything else.”
   For a moment, she sucked lightly on her knee. “Mr. Hel—may I call you Nicholai?”
   “Certainly not.”
   “Mr. Hel. You’re telling me that you don’t intend to help me, is that it?”
   “I am helping you when I tell you to go home.”
   “And if I refuse to? What if I go ahead with this on my own?”
   “You would fail—almost surely die.”
   “I know that. The question is, could you let me try to do it alone? Would your sense of debt to my uncle allow you to do that?”
   “You’re bluffing.”
   “And if I’m not?”
   Hel glanced away. It was just possible that this bourgeois muffin was dumb enough to drag him into it, or at least to make him decide how far loyalty and honor went. He was preparing to test her, and himself, when he felt an approaching presence he recognized as Pierre’s, and he turned to see the gardener shuffling toward them from the château.
   “Good afternoon, ‘sieur, m’selle. It must be pleasant to have the leisure to sun oneself.” He drew a folded sheet of paper from the pocket of his blue worker’s smock and handed it to Hel with great solemnity, then he explained that he could not stay for there were a thousand things to be done, and he went on toward the garden and his gatehouse, for it was time to soften his day with another glass.
   Hel read the note.
   He folded it and tapped it against his lips. “It appears, Miss Stern, that we may not have all the freedom of option we thought. Three strangers have arrived in Tardets and are asking questions about me and, more significantly, about you. They are described as Englishmen or Amérlos —the village people wouldn’t be able to distinguish those accents. They were accompanied by French Special Police, who are being most cooperative.”
   “But how could they know I am here?”
   “A thousand ways. Your friends, the ones who were killed in Rome, did they have plane tickets on them?”
   “I suppose so. In fact, yes. We each carried our own tickets. But they were not to here; they were to Pau.”
   “That’s close enough. I am not completely unknown.” Hel shook his head at this additional evidence of amateurism. Professionals always buy tickets to points well past their real destinations, because reservations go into computers and are therefore available to government organizations and to the Mother Company.
   “Who do you think the men are?” she asked.
   “I don’t know.”
   “What are you going to do?”
   He shrugged. “Invite them to dinner.”


* * *

   After leaving Hannah, Hel sat for half an hour in his garden, watching the accumulation of heavy-bellied storm clouds around the shoulders of the mountains and considering the lie of the stones on the board. He came to two conclusions at about the same time. It would rain that night, and his wisest course would be to rush the enemy.
   From the gun room he telephoned the Hôtel Dabadie where the Americans were staying. A certain amount of negotiation was required. The Dabadies would send the three Amérlos up to the château for dinner that evening, but there was the problem of the dinners they had prepared for their guests. After all, a hotel makes its money on its meals, not its rooms. Hel assured them that the only fair and proper course would be to include the uneaten dinners in their bill. It was, God knows, not the fault of the Dabadies that the strangers decided at the last moment to dine with M. Hel. Business is business. And considering that waste of food is abhorrent to God, perhaps it would be best if the Dabadies ate the dinners themselves, inviting the abbé to join them.
   He found Hana reading in the library, wearing the quaint little rectangular glasses she needed for close work. She looked over the top of them as he entered. “Guests for dinner?” she asked.
   He caressed her cheek with his palm. “Yes, three. Americans.”
   “How nice. With Hannah and Le Cagot, that will make quite a dinner party.”
   “It will that.”
   She slipped in a bookmark and closed the volume.
   “Is this trouble, Nikko?”
   “Yes.”
   “It has something to do with Hannah and her problems?”
   He nodded.
   She laughed lightly. “And just this morning you invited me to stay on with you for half of each year, trying to entice me with the great peace and solitude of your home.”
   “It will be peaceful soon. I have retired, after all.”
   “Can one? Can one completely retire from such a trade as yours? Ah well, if we are to have guests, I must send down to the village. Hannah will need some clothes. She cannot take dinner in those shorts of hers, particularly considering her somewhat cavalier attitude toward modest posture.”
   “Oh? I hadn’t noticed.”


* * *

   A greeting bellow from the allée, a slamming of the salon porte fenêtre that rattled the glass, a noisy search to find Hana in the library, a vigorous hug with a loud smacking kiss on her cheek, a cry for a little hospitality in the form of a glass of wine, and all the household knew that Le Cagot had returned from his duties in Larrau. “Now, where is this young girl with the plump breasts that all the valley is talking about? Bring her on. Let her meet her destiny!”
   Hana told him that the young woman was napping, but that Nicholai was working in the Japanese garden.
   “I don’t want to see him. I’ve had enough of his company for the last three days. Did he tell you about my cave? I practically had to drag your man through it. Sad to confess, he’s getting old, Hana. It’s time for you to consider your future and to look around for an ageless man—perhaps a robust Basque poet?”
   Hana laughed and told him that his bath would be ready in half an hour. “And after that you might choose to dress up a bit; we’re having guests for dinner.”
   “Ah, an audience. Good. Very well, I’ll go get some wine in the kitchen. Do you still have that young Portuguese girl working for you?”
   “There are several.”

   “I’ll go sample around a bit. And wait until you see me dressed up! I bought some fancy clothes a couple of months ago, and I haven’t had a chance to show them off yet. One look at me in my new clothes, and you’ll melt, by the Balls…”
   Hana cast a sidelong glance at him, and he instantly refined his language.
   “…by the Ecstasy of Ste. Therese. All right, I’m off to the kitchen.” And he marched through the house, slamming doors and shouting for wine.
   Hana smiled after Le Cagot. From the first he had taken to her, and his gruff way of showing his approval was to maintain a steady barrage of hyperbolic gallantry. For her part, she liked his honest, rough ways, and she was pleased that Nicholai had a friend so loyal and entertaining as this mythical Basque. She thought of him as a mythic figure, a poet who had constructed an outlandish romantic character, and who spent the rest of his life playing the role he had created. She once asked Hel what had happened to make the poet protect himself within this opéra-bouffe, picaresque facade of his. Hel could not gave her the details; to do so would betray a confidence, one Le Cagot was unaware he had invested, because the conversation had taken place one night when the poet was crushed by sadness and nostalgia, and very drunk. Many years ago, the sensitive young poet who ultimately assumed the persona of Le Cagot had been a scholar of Basque literature, and had taken a university post in Bilbao. He married a beautiful and gentle Spanish Basque girl, and they had a baby. One night, for vague motives, he joined a student demonstration against the repression of Basque culture. His wife was with him, although she had no personal interest in politics. The federal police broke up the demonstration with gunfire. The wife was killed. Le Cagot was arrested and spent the next three years in prison. When he escaped, he learned that the baby had died while he was in jail. The young poet drank a great deal and participated in pointless and terribly violent anti-government actions. He was arrested again; and when he again escaped, the young poet no longer existed. In his place was Le Cagot, the invulnerable caricature who became a folk legend for his patriotic verse, his participation in Basque Separatist causes, and his bigger-than-life personality, which brought him invitations to lecture and read his poetry in universities throughout the Western world. The name he gave to his persona was borrowed from the Cagots, an ancient pariah race of untouchables who had practiced a variant of Christianity which brought down upon them the rancor and hatred of their Basque neighbors. The Cagots sought relief from persecution through a request to Pope Leo X in 1514, which was granted in principle, but the restrictions and indignities continued to the end of the nineteenth century, when they ceased to exist as a distinct race. Their persecution took many forms. They were required to wear on their clothing the distinctive sign of the Cagot in the shape of a goose footprint. They could not walk barefooted. They could not carry arms. They could not frequent public places, and even in entering church they had to use a low side door constructed especially for the purpose, which door is still to be seen in many village churches. They could not sit near others at Mass, or kiss the cross. They could rent land and grow food, but they could not sell their produce. Under pain of death, they could not marry or have sexual relations outside their race.
   All that remained for the Cagots were the artisan trades. For many centuries, both by restriction and privilege, they were the land’s only woodcutters, carpenters, and joiners. Later, they also became the Basque masons and weavers. Because their misshapen bodies were considered funny, they became the strolling musicians and entertainers of their time, and most of what is now called Basque folk art and folklore was created by the despised Cagots.
   Although it was long assumed that the Cagots were a race apart, propagated in Eastern Europe and driven along before the advancing Visigoths until they were deposited, like moraine rubble before a glacier, in the undesirable land of the Pyrenees, modern evidence suggests they were isolated-pockets of Basque lepers, ostracized at first for prophylactic reasons, physically diminished in result of their disease, eventually taking on distinguishable characteristics because of enforced intermarriage. This theory goes a long way toward explaining the various limitations placed upon their freedom of action.
   Popular tradition has it that the Cagots and their descendants had no earlobes. To this day, in the more traditional Basque villages, girls of five and six years of age have their ears pierced and wear earrings. Without knowing the source of the tradition, the mothers respond to the ancient practice of demonstrating that their girls have lobes in which to wear earrings.
   Today the Cagots have disappeared, having either withered and grown extinct, or slowly merged with the Basque population (although this last suggestion is a risky one to advance in a Basque bar), and their name has all but fallen from use, save as a pejorative term for bent old women.
   The young poet whose sensitivity had been cauterized by events chose Le Cagot as his pen name to bring attention to the precarious situation of contemporary Basque culture, which is in danger of disappearing, like the suppressed bards and minstrels of former times.


* * *

   A little before six, Pierre tottered down to the square of Etchebar, the cumulative effect of his day’s regularly spaced glasses of wine having freed him from the tyranny of gravity to such a degree that he navigated toward the Volvo by means of tacking. He had been sent to pick up two ensembles which Hana bad ordered by telephone after asking Hannah for her sizes and translating them into European standards. After the dresses, Pierre was to collect three dinner guests from the Hôtel Dabadie. Having twice missed the door handle, Pierre pulled down the brim of his beret and focused all of his attention on the not-inconsiderable task of getting into the car, which he eventually accomplished, only to slap his forehead as he remembered an omission. He struggled out again and delivered a glancing kick to the rear fender in imitation of M’sieur Hel’s ritual, then he found his way to the driver’s seat again. With his native Basque mistrust for things mechanical, Pierre limited his gear options to reverse and low, in which he drove with the throttle wide open, using all the road and both verges. Such sheep, cows, men, and wobbly Solex mopeds as suddenly appeared before his bumper he managed to avoid by twisting the wheel sharply, then seeking the road again by feel. He abjured the effete practice of using the foot brake, and even the emergency brake he viewed as a device only for parking. As he always stopped without depressing the clutch, he avoided the nuisance of having to turn off the engine, which always bucked and died as he reached his destination and hauled back on the brake lever. Fortunately for the peasants and villagers between the château and Tardets, the sound of the Volvo’s loosened body clattering and clanking and the roar of its engine at full speed in low gear preceded Pierre by half a kilometer, and there was usually time to scurry behind trees or jump over stone walls. Pierre felt a justified pride in his driving skills, for he had never been involved in an accident. And this was all the more notable considering the wild and careless drivers all around him, whom he frequently observed swerving into ditches and up on sidewalks, or crashing into one another as he roared through stop signs or up one-way streets. It was not so much the maladroit recklessness of these other drivers that disturbed Pierre as their blatant rudeness, for often they had shouted vulgar things at him, and he could not count the number of times he had seen through his rearview mirror a finger, a fist, or even a whole forearm, throwing an angry figue at him.
   Pierre brought the Volvo to a bucking and coughing stop in the center of the Place of Tardets and clawed his way out. After bruising his toe against the battered door, he set about his commissions, the first of which was to share a hospitable glass with old friends.
   No one thought it odd that Pierre always delivered a kick to the car upon entering or leaving, as Volvo-bashing was a general practice in southwestern France, and could even be encountered as far away as Paris. Indeed, carried to cosmopolitan centers around the world by tourists, Volvo-bashing was slowly becoming a cult activity throughout the world, and this pleased Nicholai Hel, since he had begun it all.
   Some years before, seeking a car-of-all-work for the château, Hel had followed the advice of a friend and purchased a Volvo on the assumption that a car so expensive, lacking in beauty, comfort, speed, and fuel economy must have something else to recommend it. And he was assured that this something else was durability and service. His battle with rust began on the third day; and little errors of construction and design and set-up (misaligned wheels that wore out his tires within five thousand kilometers, a windshield wiper that daintily avoided contact with the glass, a rear hatch catch so designed as to require two hands to close it, so that loading and unloading was a burlesque of inefficient motion) required that he return the automobile frequently to the dealer some 150 kilometers away. It was the dealer’s view that these problems were the manufacturer’s and the manufacturer’s view that the responsibility lay with the dealer; and after months of receiving polite but vague letters of disinterested condolence from the company, Hel decided to bite the bullet and set the car to the brutish tasks of transporting sheep and bringing equipment up rough mountain roads, hoping that it would soon fall apart and justify his purchase of a vehicle with a more reliable service infrastructure. Sadly, while he had found no truth in the company’s reputation for service, there was some basis for the car’s claim to durability and, while it always ran poorly, it always ran. Under other circumstances, Hel would have viewed durability as a virtue in a machine, but he could find little consolation in the threat that his problems would go on for years.
   Having observed Pierre’s skills as a chauffeur, Hel thought to shorten his torment by allowing Pierre to drive the car whenever he chose. But this plot was foiled because ironic fate shielded Pierre from accidents. So Hel came to accept his Volvo as one of the comic burdens of life, but he allowed himself to vent his frustration by kicking or bashing the car each time he got in or out.
   It was not long before his caving associates fell into the practice of bashing his Volvo whenever they passed it, at first as a joke and later by habit. Soon they and the young men they traveled with began to bash any Volvo they passed. And in the illogical way of fads, Volvo-bashing began to spread, here taking on an anti-Establishment tone, there a quality of youthful exuberance; here as an expression of antimaterialism, there as a manifestation of in-cult with-itness.
   Even owners of Volvos began to accept the bashing craze, for it proved that they traveled in circles of the internationally aware. And there were cases of owners secretly bashing their own Volvos, to gain unearned reputations as cosmopolites. There were persistent, though probably apocryphal, rumors that Volvo was planning to introduce a prebashed model in its efforts to attract the smart set to an automobile that had sacrificed everything to passenger safety (despite their use of Firestone 500 tires on many models) and primarily appealed to affluent egotists who assumed that the continuance of their lives was important to the destiny of Man.


* * *

   After his shower, Hel found laid out in the dressing room his black broadcloth Edwardian suit, which had been designed to protect either guests in simple business suits or those in evening wear from feeling under– or overdressed. When he met Hana at the top of the principal staircase, she was in a long dress of Cantonese style that had the same social ambiguity as his suit.
   “Where’s Le Cagot?” he asked as they went down to a small salon to await their guests. “I’ve felt his presence several times today, but I haven’t heard or seen him.”
   “I assume he is dressing in his room.” Hana laughed lightly. “He told me that I would be so taken by his new clothes that I would swoon amorously into his arms.”
   “Oh, God.” Le Cagot’s taste in clothes, as in most things, ran to operatic overstatement. “And Miss Stern?”
   “She has been in her room most of the afternoon. You evidently gave her rather a bad time during your chat.”
   “Hm-m-m.”
   “She’ll be down shortly after Pierre returns with clothes for her. Do you want to hear the menu?”
   “No, I’m sure it’s perfect.”
   “Not that, but adequate. These guests give us a chance to be rid of the roebuck old M. Ibar gave us. It’s been hanging just over a week, so it should be ready. Is there something special I should know about our guests?”
   “They are strangers to me. Enemies, I believe.”
   “How should I treat them?”
   “Like any guest in our house. With that particular charm of yours that makes all men feel interesting and important. I want these people to be off balance and unsure of themselves. They are Americans. Just as you or I would be uncomfortable at a barbecue, they suffer from social vertigo at a proper dinner. Even their gratin, the jetset, are culturally as bogus as airlines cuisine.”
   “What on earth is a ‘barbecue’?”

  “A primitive tribal ritual featuring paper plates, elbows, flying insects, encrusted meat, hush puppies, and beer.”
   “I daren’t ask what a ‘hush puppy’ is.”
   “Don’t.”
   They sat together in the darkening salon, their fingers touching. The sun was down behind the mountains, and through the open porte fenêtres they could see a silver gloaming that seemed to rise from the ground of the park, its dim light filling the space beneath the black-green pines, the effect rendered mutable and dear by the threat of an incoming storm.
   “How long did you live in America, Nikko?”
   “About three years, just after I left Japan. In fact, I still have an apartment in New York.”
   “I’ve always wanted to visit New York.”
   “You’d be disappointed. It’s a frightened city in which everyone is in hot and narrow pursuit of money: the bankers, the muggers, the businessmen, the whores. If you walk the streets and watch their eyes, you see two things: fear and fury. They are diminished people hovering behind triple-locked doors. They fight with men they don’t hate, and make love to women they don’t like. Asea in a mongrel society, they borrow orts and leavings from the world’s cultures. Kir is a popular drink among those desperate to be ‘with it,’ and they affect Perrier, although they have one of the world’s great waters in the local village of Saratoga. Their best French restaurants offer what we would think of as thirty-franc meals for ten times that much, and the service is characterized by insufferable snottiness on the part of the waiter, usually an incompetent peasant who happens to be able to read the menu. But then, Americans enjoy being abused by waiters. It’s their only way of judging the quality of the food. On the other hand, if one must live in urban America—a cruel and unusual punishment at best—one might as well live in the real New York, rather than in the artificial ones farther inland. And there are some good things. Harlem has real tone. The municipal library is adequate. There is a man named Jimmy Fox who is the best barman in North America. And twice I even found myself in conversation about the nature of shibui —not shibumi, of course. It’s more within the range of the mercantile mind to talk of the characteristics of the beautiful than to discuss the nature of Beauty.”
   She struck a long match and lighted a lamp on the table before them. “But I remember you mentioning once that you enjoyed your home in America.”
   “Oh, that was not New York. I own a couple of thousand hectares in the state of Wyoming, in the mountains.”
   “Wy-om-ing. Romantic-sounding name. Is it beautiful?”
   “More sublime, I would say. It’s too ragged and harsh to be beautiful. It is to this Pyrenees country what an ink sketch is to a finished painting. Much of the open land of America is attractive. Sadly, it is populated by Americans. But then, one could say a similar thing of Greece or Ireland.”
   “Yes, I know what you mean. I’ve been to Greece. I worked mere for a year, employed by a shipping magnate.”
   “Oh? You never mentioned that.”
   “There was nothing really to mention. He was very rich and very vulgar, and he sought to purchase class and status, usually in the form of spectacular wives. While in his employ, I surrounded him with quiet comfort. He made no other demands of me. By that time, there were no other demands he could make.”
   “I see. Ah—here comes Le Cagot.”
   Hana had heard nothing, because Le Cagot was sneaking down the stairs to surprise them with his sartorial splendor. Hel smiled to himself because Le Cagot’s preceding aura carried qualities of boyish mischief and ultra-sly delight.
   He appeared at the door, his bulk half-filling the frame, his arms in cruciform to display his fine new clothes. “Regard! Regard, Niko, and burn with envy!”
   Obviously, the evening clothes had come from a theatrical costumer. They were an eclectic congregation, although the fin-de-siècle impulse dominated, with a throat wrapping of white silk in place of a cravat, and a richly brocaded waistcoat with double rows of rhinestone buttons. The black swallowtail coat was long, and its lapels were turned in gray silk. With his still-wet hair parted in the middle and his bushy beard covering most of the cravat, he had something the appearance of a middle-aged Tolstoi dressed up as a Mississippi riverboat gambler. The large yellow rose he bad pinned to his lapel was oddly correct, consonant with this amalgam of robust bad taste. He strode back and forth, brandishing his long makila like a walking stick. The makila had been in his family for generations, and there were nicks and dents on the polished ash shaft and a small bit missing from the marble knob, evidences of use as a defensive weapon by grandfathers and greatgrandfathers. The handle of a makila unscrews, revealing a twenty-centimeter blade, designed for foining, while the butt in the left hand is used for crossed parries, and its heavy marble knob is an effective clubbing weapon. Although now largely decorative and ceremonial, the makila once figured importantly in the personal safety of the Basque man alone on the road at night or roving in the high mountains.
   “That is a wonderful suit,” Hana said with excessive sincerity.
   “Is it not? Is it not?”
   “How did you come by this… suit?” Hel asked.
   “It was given to me.”
   “In result of your losing a bet?”
   “Not at all. It was given to me by a woman in appreciation for… ah, but to mention the details would be ungallant. So, when do we eat? Where are these guests of yours?”
   “They are approaching up the allée right now,” Hel said, rising and crossing toward the central hall.
   Le Cagot peered out through the porte fenêtre, but he could see nothing because evening and the storm had pressed the last of the gloaming into the earth. Still, he had become used to Hel’s proximity sensitivity, so he assumed there was someone out there.
   Just as Pierre was reaching for the handle of the pull bell, Hel opened the door. The chandeliers of the hall were behind him, so he could read the faces of his three guests, while his own was in shadow. One of them was obviously the leader; the second was a gunny CIA type, Class of ‘53; and the third was an Arab of vague personality. All three showed signs of recent emotional drain resulting from their ride up the mountain road without headlights, and with Pierre showing off his remarkable driving skills.
   “Do come in,” Hel said, stepping from the doorway and allowing them to pass before him into the reception hall, where they were met by Hana who smiled as she approached.
   “It was good of you to accept our invitation on such short notice. I am Hana. This is Nicholai Hel. And here is our friend, M. Le Cagot.” She offered her hand.
   The leader found his aplomb. “Good evening. This is Mr. Starr. Mr. … Haman. And I am Mr. Diamond.” The first crack of thunder punctuated his last word.
   Hel laughed aloud. “That must have been embarrassing. Nature seems to be in a melodramatic mood.”

Part Three.
Seki

Château d’Etchebar

   From the moment the y had the heart-squeezing experience of driving with Pierre in the battered Volvo, the three guests never quite got their feet on firm social ground. Diamond had expected to get down to cases immediately with Hel, but that clearly was not on. While Hana was conducting the party to the blue-and-gold salon for a glass of Lillet before dinner, Diamond held back and said to Hel, “I suppose you’re wondering why—”
   “After dinner.”
   Diamond stiffened just perceptibly, then smiled and half-bowed in a gesture he instantly regretted as theatrical. That damned clap of thunder!
   Hana refilled glasses and handed around canapés as she guided the conversation in such a way that Darryl Starr was soon addressing her as “Ma’am” and feeling that her interest in Texas and things Texan was a veiled fascination with him; and the PLO trainee called Haman grinned and nodded with each display of concern for his comfort and well-being. Even Diamond soon found himself recounting impressions of the Basque country and feeling both lucid and insightful. All five men rose when Hana excused herself, saying that she had to attend to the young lady who would be dining with them.
   There was a palpable silence after she left, and Hel allowed the slight discomfort to lie there, as he watched his guests with distant amusement.
   It was Darryl Starr who found a relevant remark to fill the void. “Nice place you got here.”
   “Would you like to see the house?” Hel asked.
   “Well… no, don’t trouble yourself on my account.”
   Hel said a few words aside to Le Cagot, who then crossed to Starr and with gruff bonhomie pulled him from his chair by his arm and offered to show him the garden and the gun room. Starr explained that he was comfortable where he was, thank you, but Le Cagot’s grin was accompanied by painful pressure around the American’s upper arm.
   “Indulge my whim in this, my good friend,” he said.
   Starr shrugged—as best he could—and went along.
   Diamond was disturbed, torn between a desire to control the situation and an impulse, which he recognized to be childish, to demonstrate that his social graces were as sophisticated as Hel’s. He realized that both he and this event were being managed, and he resented it. For something to say, he mentioned, “I see you’re not having anything to drink before dinner, Mr. Hel.”
   “That’s true.”
   Hel did not intend to give Diamond the comfort of rebounding conversational overtures; he would simply absorb each gesture and leave the chore of initiation constantly with Diamond, who chuckled and said, “I feel I should tell you that your driver is a strange one.”
   “Oh?”
   “Yes. He parked the car out in the village square and we had to walk the rest of the way. I was sure the storm would catch us.”
   “I don’t permit automobiles on my grounds.”
   “Yes, but after he parked the car, he gave the front door a kick that I’m sure must have dented it.”
   Hel frowned and said, “How odd. I’ll have to talk to him about that.”
   At this point, Hana and Miss Stern joined the men, the young woman looking refined and desirable in a summer tea dress she had chosen from those Hana had bought for her. Hel watched Hannah closely as she was introduced to the two men, grudgingly admiring her control and ease while confronting the people who had engineered the killing of her comrades in Rome. Hana beckoned her to sit beside her and managed immediately to focus the social attention on her youth and beauty, guiding her in such a way that only Hel could sense traces of the reality vertigo the girl was feeling. At one moment, he caught her eyes and nodded slightly in approval of aplomb. There was some bottom to this girl after all. Perhaps if she were in the company of a woman like Hana for four or five years… who knows?
   There was a gruff laugh from the hall and Le Cagot reentered, his arm around Starr’s shoulders. The Texan looked a bit shaken and his hair was tousled, but Le Cagot’s mission was accomplished; the shoulder holster under Starr’s left armpit was now empty.
   “I don’t know about you, my friends,” Le Cagot said in his accented English with the overgrowled r of the Francophone who has finally conquered that difficult consonant, “but I am ravenous! Bouffons! I could eat for four!”
   The dinner, served by the light of two candelabra on the table and lamps in wall sconces, was not sumptuous, but it was good: trout from the local gave, roebuck with cherry sauce, garden vegetables cooked in the Japanese style, the courses separated by conversation and appropriate ices, finally a salad of greens before dessert of fruit and cheeses. Compatible wines accompanied each entrée and relevé, and the particular problem of game in a fruit sauce was solved by a fine pink wine which, while it could not support the flavors, did not contradict them either. Diamond noted with slight discomfort that Hel and Hana were served only rice and vegetables during the early part of the meal, though they joined the others in salad. Further, although their hostess drank wine with the rest of them, Hel’s glass was little more than moistened with each bottle, so that in total he drank less than a full glass.
   “You don’t drink, Mr. Hel?” he asked.
   “But I do, as you see. It is only that I don’t find two sips of wine more delicious than one.”
   Padding with wines and waxing pseudopoetic in their failure to describe tastes lucidly is an affectation of socially mobile Americans, and Diamond fancied himself something of an authority. He sipped, swilled and examined the pink that accompanied the roebuck, then said, “Ah, there are Tavels, and there are Tavels.”
   Hel frowned slightly. “Ah… that’s true, I suppose.”
   “But this is a Tavel, isn’t it?”
   When Hel shrugged and changed the subject diplomatically, the nape of Diamond’s neck horripilated with embarrassment. He had been so sure it was Tavel.
   Throughout dinner, Hel maintained a distant silence, his eyes seldom leaving Diamond, though they appeared to focus slightly behind him. Effortlessly, Hana evoked jokes and stories from each of the guests in turn, and her delight and amusement was such that each felt he had outdone himself in cleverness and charm. Even Starr, who had been withdrawn and petulant after his rough treatment at Le Cagot’s hands, was soon telling Hana of his boyhood in Flatrock, Texas, and of his adventures fighting against the gooks in Korea.
   At first Le Cagot attended to the task of filling himself with food. Soon the ends of his wrapped cravat were dangling, and the long swallowtailed coat was cast aside, so by the time he was ready to dominate the party and hold forth at his usual length with vigorous and sometimes bawdy tales, he was down to his spectacular waistcoat with its rhinestone buttons. He was seated next to Hannah, and out of the blue he reached over, placed his big warm hand on her thigh, and gave it a friendly squeeze. “Tell me something in all frankness, beautiful girl. Are you struggling against your desire for me? Or have you given up the struggle? I ask you this only that I may know how best to proceed. In the meantime, eat, eat! You will need your strength. So! You men are from America, eh? Me, I was in America three times. That’s why my English is so good. I could probably pass for an American, eh? From the point of view of accent, I mean.”
   “Oh, no doubt of it,” Diamond said. He was beginning to realize how important to such men as Hel and Le Cagot was the heraldry of sheer style, even when faced by enemies, and he wanted to show that be could play any game they could.
   “But of course once people saw the clear truth shining in my eyes, and hear the music of my thoughts, the game would be up! They would know I was not an American.”
   Hel concealed a slight smile behind a finger.
   “You’re hard on Americans,” Diamond said.
   “Maybe so,” Le Cagot admitted. “And maybe I am being unjust. We get to see only the dregs of them here: merchants on vacation with their brassy wives, military men with their papier-mâché, gum-chewing women, young people seeking to ‘find themselves,’ and worst of all, academic drudges who manage to convince granting agencies that the world would be improved if they were beshat upon Europe. I sometimes think that America’s major export product is bewildered professors on sabbaticals. Is it true that everyone in the United States over twenty-five years of age has a Ph.D?” Le Cagot had the bit well between his teeth, and he began one of his tales of adventure, based as usual on a real event, but decorated with such improvements upon dull truth as occurred to him as he went along. Secure in the knowledge that Le Cagot would dominate things for many minutes, Hel let his face freeze in a politely amused expression while his mind sorted out and organized the moves that would begin after dinner.
   Le Cagot had turned to Diamond. “I am going to shed some light upon history for you, American guest of my friend. Everyone knows that the Basque and the Fascists have been enemies since before the birth of history. But few know the real source of this ancient antipathy. It was our fault, really. I confess it at last. Many years ago, the Basque people gave up the practice of shitting by the roadside, and in doing this we deprived the Falange of its principal source of nourishment. And that is the truth, I swear it by Methuselah’s Wrinkled B—”
   “Beñat?” Hana interrupted, indicating the young girl with a nod of her head.
   “—by Methuselah’s Wrinkled Brow. What’s wrong with you?” he asked Hana, his eyes moist with hurt “Do you think I have forgotten my manners?”
   Hel pushed back his chair and rose. “Mr. Diamond and I have a bit of business to attend to, I suggest you take your cognac on the terrace. You might just have time before the rain comes.”
   As they stepped down from the principal hall to the Japanese garden, Hel took Diamond by the arm. “Allow me to guide you; I didn’t think to bring a lantern.”
   “Oh? I know about your mystic proximity sense, but I didn’t know you could see in the dark as well.”
   “I can’t. But we are on my ground. Perhaps you would be well advised to remember that.”
   Hel lighted two spirit lamps in the gun room and gestured Diamond toward a low table on which there was a bottle and glasses. “Serve yourself. I’ll be with you in a moment.” He carried one of the lamps to a bookcase filled with pull drawers of file cards, some two hundred thousand cards in all. “May I assume that Diamond is your real name?”
   “It is.”
   Hel searched for the proper key card containing all cross references to Diamond. “And your initials are?”
   “Jack O.” Diamond smiled to himself as he compared Hel’s crude card file with his own sophisticated information system, Fat Boy. “I didn’t see any reason to use an alias, assuming that you would see a family resemblance between me and my brother.”
   “Your brother?”
   “Don’t you remember my brother?”
   “Not offhand.” Hel muttered to himself as he fingered through a drawer of cards. As the information on Hel’s cards was in six languages, the headings were arranged phonetically. “D. D-A, D-AI diphthong, DAI-M… ah, here we are. Diamond, Jack O. Do have a drink, Mr. Diamond. My filing system is a bit cumbersome, and I haven’t been called on to use it since my retirement.”
   Diamond was surprised that Hel did not even remember his brother. To cover his temporary confusion, he picked up the bottle and examined the label. “Armagnac?”
   “Hm-m-m.” Hel made a mental note of the cross-reference indices and sought those cards. “We’re close to the Armagnac country here. You’ll find that very old and very good. So you are a servant of the Mother Company, are you? I can therefore assume that you already have a good deal of information about me from your computer. You’ll have to give me a moment to catch up with you.”
   Diamond carried his glass with him and wandered about the gun room, looking at the uncommon weapons in cases and racks along the walls. Some of these he recognized: the nerve-gas tube, air-driven glass sliver projectors, dry-ice guns, and the like. But others were foreign to him: simple metal disks, a device that seemed to be two short rods of hickory connected by a metal link, a thimblelike cone that slipped over the finger and came to a sharp point. On the table beside the Armagnac bottle he found a small, French-made automatic. “A pretty common sort of weapon among all this exotica,” he said.
   Hel glanced up from the card he was reading. “Oh yes, I noticed that when we came in. It’s not mine, actually. It belongs to your man, the bucolic tough from Texas. I thought he might feel more relaxed without it.”
   “The thoughtful host.”
   “Thank you.” Hel set aside the card he was reading and pulled open another drawer in search of the next “That gun tells us rather a lot. Obviously, you decided not to travel armed because of the nuisance of boarding inspections. So your lad was given the gun after he got here. Its make tells us he received the gun from French police authorities. That means you have them in your pocket.”
   Diamond shrugged. “France needs oil too, just like every other industrial country.”
   “Yes. Ici on n’a pas d’huile, mais on a des idées.”
   “Meaning?”
   “Nothing really. Just a slogan from French internal propaganda. So I see here that the Major Diamond from Tokyo was your brother. That’s interesting—mildly interesting, anyway.” Now that he considered it, Hel found a certain resemblance between the two, the narrow face, the intense black eyes set rather close together, the falciform nose, the thin upper lip and heavy, bloodless lower, a certain intensity of manner.
   “I thought you would have guessed that when you first heard my name.”
   “Actually, I had pretty much forgotten him. After all, our account was settled. So you began working for the Mother Company in the Early Retirement Program, did you? That is certainly consonant with your brother’s career.”
   Some years before, the Mother Company had discovered that its executives after the age of fifty began to be notably less productive, just at the time the Company was paying them the most. The problem was presented to Fat Boy, who offered the solution of organizing an Early Retirement Division that would arrange for the accidental demise of a small percentage of such men, usually while on vacation, and usually of apparent stroke or heart attack. The savings to the Company were considerable. Diamond had risen to the head of this division before being promoted to conducting Mother Company’s control over CIA and NSA.
   “…so it appears that both you and your brother found a way to combine native sadism with the comforting fringe benefits of working for big business, he for the army and CIA, you for the oil combines. Both products of the American Dream, the mercantile mumpsimus. Just bright young men trying to get ahead.”
   “But at least neither of us ended up as hired killers.”
   “Rubbish. Any man is a killer who works for a company that pollutes, strip-mines, and contaminates the air and water. The fact that you and your unlamented brother killed from institutional and patriotic ambush doesn’t mean you’re not killers—it only means you’re cowards.”
   “You think a coward would walk into your lair as I have done?”
   “A certain kind of coward would. A coward who was afraid of his cowardice.”
   Diamond laughed thinly. “You really hate me, don’t you?”
   “Not at all. You’re not a person, you’re an organization man. One couldn’t hate you as an individual; one could only hate the phylum. At all events, you’re not the sort to evoke such intense emotions as hate. Disgust might be closer to the mark.”
   “Still, for all the disdain of your breeding and private education, it is people like me—what you sneeringly call the merchant class—who hire you and send you out to do their dirty work.”
   Hel shrugged. “It has always been so. Throughout all history, the merchants have cowered behind the walls of their towns, while the paladins did battle to protect them, in return for which the merchants have always fawned and bowed and played the lickspittle. One cannot really blame them. They are not bred to courage. And, more significantly, you can’t put bravery in the bank.” Hel read the last information card quickly and tossed it on the stack to be refiled later. “All right, Diamond. Now I know who you are and what you are. At least, I know as much about you as I need to, or choose to.”
   “I assume your information came from the Gnome?”
   “Much of it came from the person you call the Gnome.”
   “We would give a great deal to know how that man came by his intelligence.”
   “I don’t doubt it. Of course, I wouldn’t tell you if I knew. But the fact is, I haven’t the slightest idea.”
   “But you do know the identity and location of the Gnome.”
   Hel laughed. “Of course I do. But the gentleman and I are old friends.”
   “He’s nothing more or less than a blackmailer.”
   “Nonsense. He is an artisan in the craft of information. He has never taken money from a man in return for concealing the facts he collects from all over the world.”
   “No, but he provides men like you with the information that protects you from punishment by governments, and for that he makes a lot of money.”
   “The protection is worth a great deal. But if it will set your mind at rest, the man you call the Gnome is very ill. It is doubtful that he will live out the year.”
   “So you will soon be without protection?”
   “I shall miss him as a man of wit and charm. But the loss of protection is a matter of little importance to me. I am, as Fat Boy must have informed you, fully retired. Now what do you say we get on with our little business.”
   “Before we start, I have a question I want to ask you.”
   “I have a question for you as well, but let’s leave that for later. So that we don’t waste time with exposition, allow me to give you the picture in a couple of sentences, and you may correct me if I stray.” Hel leaned against the wall, his face in the shadows and his soft prison voice unmodulated. “We begin with Black Septembrists murdering Israeli athletes in Munich. Among the slain was Asa Stern’s son. Asa Stern vows to have vengeance. He organizes a pitiful little amateur cell to this end—don’t think badly of Mr. Stern for the paucity of this effort; he was a good man, but he was sick and partially drugged. Arab intelligence gets wind of this effort. The Arabs, probably through an OPEC representative, ask the Mother Company to erase this irritant. The Mother Company turns the task over to you, expecting you to use your CIA bully boys to do the job. You learn that the revenge cell—I believe they called themselves the Munich Five—was on its way to London to put the last surviving members of the Munich murder away. CIA arranges a spoiling action in Rome International. By the way, I assume those two fools back in the house were involved in the raid?”

  “Yes.”
   “And you’re punishing them by making them clean up after themselves?”
   “That’s about it.”
   “You’re taking the risks, Mr. Diamond, A foolish associate is more dangerous than a clever opponent.”
   “That’s my concern.”
   “To be sure. All right, your people do a messy and incomplete job in Rome. Actually, you should be grateful they did as well as they did. With a combination of Arab Intelligence and the CIA competence, you’re lucky they didn’t go to the wrong airport. But that, as you have said, is your concern. Somehow, probably when the raid was evaluated in Washington, you discovered that the Israeli boys were not going to London. They carried airline tickets for Pau. You also discovered that one of the cell members, the Miss Stern with whom you just took dinner, had been overlooked by your killers. Your computer was able to relate me to Asa Stern, and the Pau destination nailed it down. Is that it?”
   “That roughly is it.”
   “All right. So much for catching up. The ball, I believe, is in your court.”
   Diamond had not yet decided how he would present his case, what combination of threat and promise would serve to neutralize Nicholai Hel. To gain time, he pointed to a pair of odd-looking pistols with curved handles like old-fashioned dueling weapons and double nine-inch barrels that were slightly flared at the ends.
   “What are these?”
   “Shotguns, in a way of speaking.”
   “Shotguns?”
   “Yes. A Dutch industrialist had them made for me. A gift in return for a rather narrow action involving his son who was held captive on a train by Moluccan terrorists. Each gun, as you see, has two hammers which drop simultaneously on special shotgun shells with powerful charges that scatter loads of half-centimeter ball bearings. All the weapons in this room are designed for a particular situation. These are for close work in the dark, or for putting away a roomful of men on the instant of break-in. At two meters from the barrel, they lay down a spread pattern a meter in diameter.” Hel’s bottle-green eyes settled on Diamond. “Do you intend to spend the evening talking about guns?”
   “No. I assume that Miss Stern has asked you to help her kill the Septembrists now in London?”
   Hel nodded.
   “And she took it for granted that you would help, because of your friendship for her uncle?”
   “She made that assumption.”
   “And what do you intend to do?”
   “I intend to listen to your proposal.”
   “My proposal?”
   “Isn’t that what merchants do? Make proposals?”
   “I wouldn’t exactly call it a proposal.”
   “What would you call it?”
   “I would call it a display of deterrent action, partially already on line, partially ready to be brought on line, should you be so foolish as to interfere.”
   Hel’s eyes crinkled in a smile that did not include his lips. He made a rolling gesture with his hand, inviting Diamond to get on with it.
   “I’ll confess to you that, under different conditions, neither the Mother Company nor the Arab interests we are allied with would care much one way or another what happened to the homicidal maniacs of the PLO. But these are difficult times within the Arab community, and the PLO has become something of a rallying banner, an issue more of public relations than of private taste. For this reason, the Mother Company is committed to their protection. This means that you will not be allowed to interfere with those who intend to hijack that plane in London.”
   “How will I be prevented?”
   “Do you recall that you used to own several thousand acres of land in Wyoming?”
   “I assume the tense is not a matter of grammatical carelessness.”
   “That’s right. Part of that land was in Boyle County, the rest in Custer County. If you contact the county clerk offices, you will discover that there exists no record of your having purchased that land. Indeed, the records show that the land in question is now, and has been for many years, in the hands of one of Mother Company’s affiliates. There is some coal under the land, and it is scheduled for strip-mining.”
   “Do I understand that if I cooperate with you, the land will be returned to me?”
   “Not at all. That land, representing as it does most of what you have saved for your retirement, has been taken from you as a punishment for daring to involve yourself in the affairs of the Mother Company.”
   “May I assume you suggested this punishment?”
   Diamond tipped his head to the side. “I had that pleasure.”
   “You are a vicious little bastard, aren’t you. You’re telling me that if I pull out of this affair, the land will be spared from strip-mining?”
   Diamond pushed out his lower lip. “Oh, I’m afraid I couldn’t make an arrangement like that. America needs all its natural energy to make it independent from foreign sources.” He smiled at this repetition of the worn party line. “Then too, you can’t put beauty in the bank.”
   He was enjoying himself.
   “I don’t understand what you’re doing, Diamond. If you intend to take the land and destroy it, no matter what I do, then what leverage does that give you over my actions?”
   “As I said, taking your land was in the nature of a warning shot across your bow. And a punishment.”
   “Ah, I see. A personal punishment. From you. For your brother?”
   “That’s right.”
   “He deserved death, you know. I was tortured for three days. This face of mine is not completely mobile even now, after all the operations.”
   “He was my brother! Now, let’s pass on to the sanctions and penalties you will incur, should you fail to cooperate. Under the key group KL443, Code Number 45-389-75, you had approximately one-and-a-half-million dollars in gold bullion in the Federal Bank of Zurich. That represented nearly all the rest of what you intended to retire on. Please note the past tense again.”
   Hel was silent for a moment. “The Swiss too need oil.”
   “The Swiss need oil too,” Diamond echoed. “That money will reappear in your account seven days after the successful accomplishment of the hijacking by the Septembrists. So you see, far from interrupting their plans and killing some of their number, it would benefit you to do everything in your power to make sure they succeed.”
   “And presumably that money serves also as your personal protection.”
   “Precisely. Should anything happen to me or my friends while we are your guests, that money disappears, victim of an accounting error.”
   Hel was attracted to the sliding doors giving out on his Japanese garden. The rain had come, hissing in the gravel and vibrating the tips of black and silver foliage. “And that is it?”
   “Not quite. We are aware that you probably have a couple of hundred thousand here and there as emergency funds. A psychological profile of you from Fat Boy tells us that it is just possible that you may put such things as loyalty to a dead friend and his niece ahead of all considerations of personal benefit. All part of being selectively bred and tutored in Japanese concepts of honor, don’t you know. We are prepared for that foolish eventuality as well. In the first place, the British MI-5 and MI-6 are alerted to keep tabs on you and to arrest you the moment you set foot on their soil. To assist them in this task, the French Internal Security forces are committed to making sure you do not leave this immediate district. Descriptions of you have been distributed. If you are discovered in any village other than your own, you will be shot on sight. Now, I am familiar with your history of accomplishments in the face of improbable odds, and I realize that, for you, these forces we have put on line are more in the nature of nuisances than deterrents. But we are going through the motions nonetheless. The Mother Company must be seen to be doing everything in Her power to protect the London Septembrists. Should that protection fail—and I almost hope it does—then the Mother Company must be seen to mete out punishment—punishment of an intensity that will satisfy our Arab friends. And you know what those people are like. To satisfy their taste for revenge, we would be forced to do something very thorough and very… imaginative.”
   Hel was silent for a moment. “I told you at the outset of our chat that I had a question for you, merchant. Here it is. Why did you come here?”
   “That should be obvious.”
   “Perhaps I didn’t accent my question properly. Why did you come here? Why didn’t you send a messenger? Why bring your face into my presence and run the risk of my remembering you?”
   Diamond stared at Hel for a moment “I’ll be honest with you…”
   “Don’t break any habits on my account.”
   “I wanted to tell you about the loss of your land in Wyoming personally. I wanted to display in person the mass of punishment I have designed, if you are rash enough to disobey the Mother Company. It’s something I owe my brother.”
   Hel’s emotionless gaze settled on Diamond, who stood rigid with defiance, his eyes shining with a tear glaze that revealed the body fright within him. He had taken a dangerous plunge, this merchant. He had left the cover of laws and systems behind which corporate men hide and from which their power derives, and he had run the risk of showing his face to Nicholai Alexandrovitch Hel. Diamond was subconsciously aware of his dependent anonymity, of his role as a social insect clawing about in the frantic nests of profit and success. Like others of his caste, he found spiritual solace in the cowboy myth. At this moment, Diamond saw himself as a virile individualist striding bravely down the dusty street of a Hollywood back lot, his hand hovering an inch above the computer in his holster. It is revealing of the American culture that its prototypic hero is the cowboy: an uneducated, boorish, Victorian migrant agricultural worker. At base, Diamond’s role was ludicrous: the Tom Mix of big business facing a yojimbo with a garden. Diamond possessed the most extensive computer system in the world; Hel had some file cards. Diamond had all the governments of the industrialized West in his pocket; Hel had some Basque friends. Diamond represented atomic energy, the earth’s oil supply, the military/industrial symbiosis, the corrupt and corrupting governments established by the Wad to shield itself from responsibility; Hel represented shibumi, a faded concept of reluctant beauty. And yet, it was obvious that Hel had a considerable advantage in any battle that might be joined.
   Hel turned his face away and shook his head slightly. “This must be embarrassing to be you.”
   During the silence, Diamond’s fingernails had dug into his palms. He cleared his throat. “Whatever you think of me, I cannot believe that you will sacrifice the years remaining to you for one gesture that would be appreciated by no one but that middle-class dumpling I met at dinner. I think I know what you are going to do, Mr. Hel. You are going to consider this matter at length and realize at last that a handful of sadistic Arabs is not worth this home and life you have made for yourself here; you will realize that you are not honor-bound to the desperate hopes of a sick and drug-befuddled man; and finally you will decide to back off. One of the reasons you will do this is because you would consider it demeaning to make an empty gesture of courage to impress me, a man you despise. Now, I don’t expect you to tell me that you’re backing off right now. That would be too humiliating, too damaging to your precious sense of dignity. But that is what you will do at last. To be truthful, I almost wish you would persist in this matter. It would be a pity to see the punishments I have devised for you go unused. But, fortunately for you, the Chairman of the Mother Company is adamant that the Septembrists go unmolested. We are arranging what will be called the Camp David Peace Talks in the course of which Israel will be pressured into leaving her southern and eastern borders naked. As a by-product of these talks, the PLO will be dealt out of the Middle Eastern game. They have served their irritant purpose. But the Chairman wants to keep the Palestinians mollified until this coup comes off. You see, Mr. Hel, you’re swimming in deep currents, involved with forces just a little beyond shotgun pistols and cute gardens.”
   Hel regarded Diamond in silence for a moment. Then he turned toward his garden. “This conversation is over,” he said quietly.
   “I see.” Diamond took a card from his pocket’. “I can be contacted at this number. I shall be back at my office within ten hours. When you tell me that you have decided not to interfere in this business, I shall initiate the release of your Swiss funds.”
   As Hel no longer seemed to be aware of his presence, Diamond put the card on the table, “There’s nothing more for us to discuss at this time, so I’ll be on my way.”
   “What? Oh, yes. I am sure you can find your way out, Diamond. Hana will serve you coffee before sending you and your lackeys back to the village. No doubt Pierre has been fortifying himself with wine for the past few hours and will be in good form to give you a memorable ride.”
   “Very well. But first… there was that question I had for you.”
   “Well?”
   “That rosé I had with dinner. What was it?”
   “Tavel, of course.”
   “I knew it!”
   “No, you didn’t. You almost knew it.”

  The arm of the garden extending toward the Japanese building had been designed for listening to rain. Hel worked for weeks each rainy season, barefoot and wearing only sodden shorts, as he tuned the garden. The gutters and downspouts had been drilled and shaped, plants moved and removed, gravel distributed, sounding stones arranged in the stream, until the blend of soprano hissing of rain through gravel, the basso drip onto broad-leaved plants, the reedy resonances of quivering bamboo leaves, the counterpoint of the gurgling stream, all were balanced in volume in such a way that, if one sat precisely in the middle of the tatami ’d room, no single sound dominated. The concentrating listener could draw one timbre out of the background, or let it merge again, as he shifted the focus of his attention, much as the insomniac can tune in or out the ticking of a clock. The effort required to control the instrument of a well-tuned garden is sufficient to repress quotidian worries and anxieties, but this anodyne property is not the principal goal of the gardener, who must be more devoted to creating a garden than to using it.
   Hel sat in the gun room, hearing the rain, but lacking the peace of spirit to listen to it. There was bad aji in this affair. It wasn’t of a piece, and it was treacherously… personal. It was Hel’s way to play against the patterns on the board, not against fleshy, inconsistent living opponents. In this business, moves would be made for illogical reasons; there would be human filters between cause and effect. The whole thing stank of passion and sweat.
   He released a long sigh in a thin jet of breath. “Well?” he asked. “And what do you make of all this?”
   There was no answer. Hel felt her aura take on a leporine palpitation between the urge to flee and fear of movement. He slid back the door panel to the tea room and beckoned with his finger.
   Hannah Stern stood in the doorway, her hair wet with rain, and her sodden dress clinging to her body and legs. She was embarrassed at being caught eavesdropping, but defiantly unwilling to apologize. In her view, the importance of the matters at hand out-weighed any consideration of good form and rules of polite behavior. Hel might have told her that, in the long run, the “minor” virtues are the only ones that matter. Politeness is more reliable than the moist virtues of compassion, charity, and sincerity; just as fair play is more important than the abstraction of justice. The major virtues tend to disintegrate under the pressures of convenient rationalization. But good form is good form, and it stands immutable in the storm of circumstance.
   Hel might have told her this, but he was not interested in her spiritual education, and he had no wish to decorate the unperfectible. At all events, she would probably have understood only the words, and if she were to penetrate to meanings, what use would be the barriers and foundations of good form to a woman whose life would be lived out in some Scarsdale or other?
   “Well?” he asked again. “What did you make of all that?”
   She shook her head. “I had no idea they were so… organized; so… cold-blooded. I’ve caused you a lot of trouble, haven’t I?”
   “I don’t hold you responsible for anything that has happened so far. I have long known that I have a karma debt. Considering the fact that my work has cut across the grain of social organization, a certain amount of bad luck would be expected. I’ve not had that bad luck, and so I’ve built up a karma debt; a weight of antichance against me. You were the vehicle for karma balance, but I don’t consider you the cause. Do you understand any of that?”
   She shrugged. “What are you going to do?”
   The storm was passing, and the winds behind it blew in from the garden and made Hannah shudder in her wet dress.
   “There are padded kimonos in that chest Get out of those clothes.”
   “I’m all right”
   “Do as I tell you. The tragic heroine with the sniffles is too ludicrous an image.”
   It was consonant with the too-brief shorts, the unbuttoned shirt front and the surprise Hannah affected (believed she genuinely felt) when men responded to her as an object that she unzipped and stepped out of the wet dress before she sought out the dry kimono. She had never confessed to herself that she took social advantage of having a desirable body that appeared to be available. If she had thought of it, she would have labeled her automatic exhibitionism a healthy acceptance of her body—an absence of “hangups.”
   “What are you going to do?” she asked again, as she wrapped the warm kimono about her.
   “The real question is what are you going to do. Do you still intend to press on with this business? To throw yourself off the pier in the hopes that I will have to jump in after you?”
   “Would you? Jump in after me?”
   “I don’t know.”
   Hannah stared out into the dark of the garden and hugged the comforting kimono to herself. “I don’t know… I don’t know. It all seemed so clear just yesterday. I knew what I had to do, what was the only just and right thing to do.”
   “And now…?”
   She shrugged and shook her head. “You’d rather I went home and forgot all about it, wouldn’t you?”
   “Yes. And that might not be as easy as you think, either. Diamond knows about you. Getting you safely home will take a little doing.”
   “And what happens to the Septembrists who murdered our athletes in Munich?”
   “Oh, they’ll die. Everyone does, eventually.”
   “But… if I just go home, then Avrim’s death and Chaim’s would be pointless!”
   “That’s true. They were pointless deaths, and nothing you might do would change that.”
   Hannah stepped close to Hel and looked up at him, her face full of confusion and doubt. She wanted to be held, comforted, told that everything would be just fine.
   “You’ll have to decide what you intend to do fairly quickly. Let’s go back to the house. You can think things out tonight.”


* * *

   They found Hana and Le Cagot sitting in the cool of the wet terrace. The gusting wind had followed the storm, and the air was fresh and washed. Hana rose as they approached and took Hannah’s hand in an unconscious gesture of kindness.
   Le Cagot was sprawled on a stone bench, his eyes closed, his brandy glass loose in his fingers, and his heavy breathing occasionally rippling in a light snore.
   “He dropped off right in the middle of a story,” Hana explained.
   “Hana,” Hel said. “Miss Stern won’t be staying with us after tonight. Would you see to having her things packed by morning? I’m going to take her up to the lodge.” He turned to Hannah. “I have a mountain place. You can stay there, out of harm’s way, while I consider how to get you back to your parents safely.”
   “I haven’t decided that I want to go home.”
   Instead of responding, Hel kicked the sole of Le Cagot’s boot. The burly Basque started and smacked his lips several times. “Where was I? Ah… I was telling you of those three nuns in Bayonne. Well, I met them—”
   “No, you decided not to tell that one, considering the presence of ladies.”
   “Oh? Well, good! You see, little girl, a story like that would inflame your passions. And when you come to me, I want you to do so of your own will, and not driven by blinding lust. What happened to our guests?”
   “They’ve gone. Probably back to the United States.”
   “I am going to tell you something in all frankness, Niko. I do not like those men. There is cowardice in their eyes; and that makes them dangerous. You must either invite a better class of guests, or risk losing my patronage. Hana, wonderful and desirable woman, do you want to go to bed with me?”
   She smiled. “No, thank you, Beñat.”
   “I admire your self control. What about you, little girl?”
   “She’s tired,” Hana said.
   “Ah well, perhaps it’s just as good. It would be a little crowded in my bed, what with the plump Portuguese kitchen maid. So! I hate to leave you without the color and charm of my presence, but the magnificent machine that is my body needs draining, then sleep. Good night, my friends.” He grunted to his feet and started to leave, then he noticed Hannah’s kimono. “What’s this? What happened to your clothes? Oh, Niko, Niko. Greed is a vice. Ah well… good night.”


* * *

   Hana had gently stroked the tension from his back and shoulders as he lay on his stomach, and now she tugged his hair until he was half asleep. She placed her body over his, fitting her lap to his buttocks, her legs and arms over his, her warm weight protecting him, comforting, forcing him to relax. “This is trouble, isn’t it?” she whispered.
   He hummed in affirmation.
   “What are you going to do?”
   “I don’t know,” he breathed. “Get the girl away from here first. They may think that her death would cancel my debt to the uncle.”
   “You are sure they won’t find her? There’s no such thing as a secret in these valleys.”
   “Only the mountain men will know where she is. They’re my people; and they don’t talk to police, by habit and tradition.”
   “And what then?”
   “I don’t know. I’ll think about it.”
   “Shall I bring you pleasure?”
   “No. I’m too tense. Let me be selfish. Let me bring you pleasure.”

Larun

   Hel was awake at dawn and put in two hours of work on the garden before he took breakfast with Hana in the tatami ’d room overlooking the newly raked sea gravel that flowed down to the edge of the stream; “In time, Hana, this will be an acceptable garden. I hope you are here to enjoy it with me.”
   “I have been giving that matter consideration, Nikko. The idea is not without its attractions. You were very thorough last night.”
   “I was working out some stresses. That’s an advantage.”
   “If I were selfish, I would hope for such stresses always.”
   He chuckled. “Oh, will you telephone down to the village and arrange for the next flight back to the United States for Miss Stern? It will be Pau to Paris, Paris to New York, New York to Chicago.”
   “She is leaving us then?”
   “Not just yet. I don’t want her in the open. But the reservations will be stored in the airline’s computer bank, and will be immediately available to Fat Boy. It will throw them off the track.”
   “And who is ‘Fat Boy’?”
   “A computer. The final enemy. It arms stupid men with information.”
   “You sound bitter this morning.”
   “I am. Even self-pitying.”
   “I had avoided that phrase, but it is the right one. And it’s not becoming in a man like you.”
   “I know.” He smiled. “No one in the world would dare correct me like that, Hana. You’re a treasure.”
   “It’s my role to be a treasure.”
   “True. By the way, where is Le Cagot? I haven’t heard him thundering about.”
   “He went off an hour ago with Miss Stern. He’s going to show her some of the deserted villages. I must say she seemed to be in good spirits.”
   “The shallow recover quickly. You can’t bruise a pillow. When will they be back?”
   “By lunch surely. I promised Beñat a roast of gigot. You said you were taking Hannah to the lodge. When will you be leaving?”
   “After twilight. I’m being watched.”
   “You intend to spend the night there with her?”
   “Hm-m. I suppose so. I wouldn’t want to come back down those roads in the dark.”
   “I know you don’t like Hannah, but—”
   “I don’t like her type, thrill-seeking middle-class muffins tickling themselves with the thrill of terror and revolution. Her existence has already cost me a great deal.”
   “Do you intend to punish her while you’re up there?”
   “I hadn’t thought about it.”
   “Don’t be harsh. She’s a good child.”
   “She is twenty-four years old. She has no right to be a child at that age. And she is not good. At best, she is ‘cute.’”
   Hel knew what Hana meant by “punishing” the girl. He had occasionally avenged himself on young women who had annoyed him by making love to them, using his tactical skills and exotic training to create an experience the woman could never approach again and would seek in vain through affairs and marriages for the rest of her life.
   Hana felt no jealousy concerning Hannah; that would have been ridiculous. During the two years they had lived together, both she and Hel had been free to go off on little trips and seek sexual diversion, exercises of physical curiosity that kept their appetites in tone and made more precious, by comparison, what they had. Hana once chided him lightheartedly, complaining that he had the better of the arrangement, for a trained man can accomplish decent levels of exercise with a willing amateur; while even the most gifted and experienced woman has difficulty, with the gauche instrument of a bumbling man, achieving much beyond lust-scratching. Still, she enjoyed the occasional well-muscled young man of Paris or the Côte d’Azure, primarily as objects of physical beauty: toys to cuddle.


* * *

   They drove along the twisting valley road, already dark with descending evening. The mountains rising sharply to their left were featureless geometric shapes, while those to their right were pink and amber in the horizontal rays of the setting sun. When they started from Etchebar, Hannah had been full of chatter about the robust good time she had had that afternoon with Le Cagot, wandering through deserted villages in the uplands, where she had noticed that each church clock had had its hands removed by the departing peasants. Le Cagot had explained that removing the hands of the clocks was considered necessary, because there would be no one in the churches to keep the clock weights screwed up, and one could not allow God’s clock to be inaccurate. The dour tone of primitive Basque Catholicism was expressed in a memento mori inscription on the tower of one deserted church; “Each hour wounds, the last kills.”
   She was silent now, awed by the desolate beauty of the mountains rising so abruptly from the narrow valley that they seemed to overhang. Twice, Hel frowned and glanced over at her to find her eyes soft and a calm smile on her lips. He had been attracted and surprised by the alpha saturation in her aura, uncommon and unexpected in a person he had dismissed as a peppy twit. It was the timbre of calm and inner peace. He was going to question her about her decision concerning the Septembrists, when his attention was arrested by the approach of a car from behind driving with only wing lights. It flashed through his mind that Diamond or his French police lackeys might have learned that he was moving her to a safer place, and his hands gripped the wheel as he recalled the features of the road, deciding where he would force the car to pass him, then knock it into the ravine that raced along to their left. He had taken an exhaustive course in offensive driving, in result of which he always drove heavy cars, like his damned Volvo, for just such emergencies as this.
   The road was never straight, constantly curving and twisting as it followed the course of the river ravine.
   There was no place a safe pass could be made, but that, of course, would not deter a French driver, whose adolescent impulse to pass is legendary. The car behind continued to close the distance until it was only a meter from his back bumper. It flashed its headlights and sounded its horn, then whipped around while they were in a tight blind curve.
   Hel relaxed and slowed to let the car pass. The horn and the lights told him that this was not an assassination attempt. No professional would telegraph his move like that. It was just another childish French driver.
   He shook his head paternally as the underpowered Peugeot strained its motor in its laboring effort to pass, the young driver’s knuckles white on the steering wheel, his eyes bulging from their sockets in his effort to hold the road.
   In his experience, Hel had found that only older North American drivers, with the long distances they habitually travel on good roads with competent machines, have become inured to the automobile as toy and as manhood metaphor. The French driver’s infantile recklessness often annoyed him, but not so much as did the typical Italian driver’s use of the automobile as an extension of his penis, or the British, driver’s use of it as a substitute.
   For half an hour after leaving the valley road, they pulled up toward the mountains of Larun, over an unimproved road that writhed like a snake in its final agony. Some of the cutbacks were inside the turning radius of the Volvo, and negotiating them required two cuts and a bit of skidding close to the edge of loose gravel verges. They were never out of low gear, and they rose so steeply that they climbed out of the night that had pooled in the valley and into the zebra twilight of the high mountains: a blinding glare on the windshield when they turned toward the west, then blackness when outcroppings of rock blocked the setting sun.
   Even this primitive road petered out, and they continued to ascend along faint ruts pressed into stubbly alpine meadows. The setting sun was now red and huge, its base flattened as it melted into the shimmering horizon. There were snow fields on the peaks above them glowing pink, then soon mauve, then purple against a black sky. The first stars glittered in the darkening east while the sky to the west was still hazy blue around the blood-red rim of the sinking sun.
   Hel stopped the car by an outcropping of granite and set the hand brake. “We have to pack in from here. It’s another two and a half kilometers.”
   “Up?” Hannah asked.
   “Mostly up.”
   “God, this lodge of yours is certainly out of the way.”
   “That’s its role.” They got out and unloaded her pack from the car, experiencing the characteristic frustration of the Volvo’s diabolic rear latch. They had walked twenty meters before it occurred to him to perform his satisfying ritual. Rather than go back, he picked up a jagged rock and hurled it, a lucky shot that hit a rear window and made a large cobweb of crackled safety glass.
   “What was that all about?” Hannah asked.
   “Just a gesture. Man against the system. Let’s go. Stay close. I know the trail by feel.”
   “How long will I be up here all alone?”
   “Until I decide what to do with you.”
   “Will you be staying tonight?”
   “Yes.”
   They walked on for a minute before she said, “I’m glad.”


* * *

   He maintained a brisk pace because the light was draining fast. She was strong and young, and could stay with him, walking in silence, captured by the rapid but subtle color shifts of a mountain twilight. Again, as before down in the valley, he intercepted a surprising alpha tone in her aura—that rapid, midvolume signal that he associated with meditation and soul peace, and not at all with the characteristic signature timbres of young Westerners.
   She stopped suddenly as they were crossing the last alpine meadow before the narrow ravine leading to the lodge.
   “What is it?”
   “Look. These flowers. I’ve never seen anything like them before.” She bent close to the wiry-stalked bells of dusty gold, just visible in the groundglow.
   He nodded. “They’re unique to this meadow and to one other over there.” He gestured westward, toward the Table of the Three Kings, no longer visible in the gloom. “We’re just above twelve hundred here. Both here and over there, they grow only at twelve hundred, Locally they are called the Eye of Autumn, and most people have never seen them, because they bloom for only three or four days.”
   “Beautiful. But it’s almost dark, and they’re still open.”
   “They never close. Tradition has it that they live so short a time they dare not close.”
   “That’s sad.”
   He shrugged.


* * *

   They sat opposite one another at a small table, finishing supper as they looked out through the plate-glass wall that gave onto the steep, narrow gully that was the only access to the lodge. Normally, Hel would be uneasy sitting in front of a glass wall, his form lighted by an oil lamp, while all was dark beyond. But he knew that the double plate glass was bulletproof.
   The lodge was built of local stone and was simple of design: one large room with a cantilevered sleeping balcony. When first they arrived, he had acquainted Hannah with its features. The stream that flowed from a permanent snowfield above passed directly under the lodge, so one could get water through a trap door without going outside. The four-hundred-liter oil tank that fueled the stove and space heater was encased in the same stone as the lodge, so that incoming gunfire could not rupture it. There was a boiler-plate shutter that closed over the only door. The larder was cut into the face of granite that constituted one wall of the lodge, and contained thirty days’ supply of food. Set into the bulletproof plate-glass wall was one small pane that could be broken out to permit firing down into the tight ravine up which anyone approaching the lodge would have to pass. The walls of the ravine were smooth, and all covering boulders had been dislodged and rolled to the bottom.
   “Lord, you could hold an army off forever!” she exclaimed.