“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?”