Shibumi (26 page)

It was early autumn, the fourth autumn Hel had passed in his cell in Sugamo Prison. He knelt on the floor before his desk/bed, lost in an elusive problem of Basque grammar, when he felt a tingling at the roots of the hair on the nape of his neck. He lifted his head and concentrated on the projections he was intercepting. This person’s approaching aura was alien to him. There were sounds at the door, and it swung open. A smiling guard with a triangular scar on his forehead entered, one Nicholai had never seen or felt before.

The guard cleared his throat. “Come with me, please.”

Hel frowned. The
Onasai
form? Respect language from a guard to a prisoner? He carefully arranged his notes and closed the book before rising. He instructed himself to be calm and careful. There could be hope in this unprecedented rupture of routine… or danger. He rose and preceded the guard out of the cell.

“Mr. Hel? Delighted to make your acquaintance.” The polished young man rose to shake Hel’s hand as he entered the visitors’ room. The contrast between his close-fitting Ivy League suit and narrow tie and Hel’s crumpled gray prison uniform was no greater than that between their physiques and temperaments. The hearty CIA agent was robust and athletic, capable of the first-naming and knee-jerk congeniality that marks the American salesman. Hel, slim and wiry, was reserved and distant. The agent, who was noted for winning immediate confidences, was a creature of words and reason. Hel was a creature of meaning and undertone. It was the battering ram and the rapier.

The agent nodded permission for the guard to leave. Hel sat on the edge of his chair, having had nothing but his steel cot to sit on for three years, and having lost the facility for sitting back and relaxing. After all that time of not hearing himself addressed in social speech, he found the urbane chat of the agent not so much disturbing as irrelevant.

“I’ve asked them to bring up a little tea,” the agent said, smiling with a gruff shagginess of personality that he had always found so effective in public relations. “One thing you’ve got to hand to these Japanese, they make a good cup of tea—what my limey friends call a ‘nice cuppa.’” He laughed at his failure to produce a recognizable cockney accent.

Hel watched him without speaking, taking some pleasure in the fact that the American was caught off balance by the battered appearance of his face, at first glancing away uneasily, and subsequently forcing himself to look at it without any show of disgust.

“You’re looking pretty fit, Mr. Hel. I had expected that you would show the effects of physical inactivity. Of course, you have one advantage. You don’t overeat. Most people overeat, if you want my opinion. The old human body would do better with a lot less food than we give it. We sort of clog up the tubes with chow, don’t you agree? Ah, here we are! Here’s the tea.”

The guard entered with a tray on which there was a thick pot and two handleless Japanese cups. The agent poured clumsily, like a friendly bear, as though gracelessness were proof of virility. Hel accepted the cup, but he did not drink.

“Cheers,” the agent said, taking his first sip. He shook his head and laughed. “I guess you don’t say ‘cheers’ when you’re drinking tea. What do you say?”

Hel set his cup on the table beside him. “What do you want with me?”

Trained in courses on one-to-one persuasion and small-group management, the agent believed he could sense a cool tone in Hel’s attitude, so he followed the rules of his training and flowed with the ambience of the feedback. “I guess you’re right. It would be best to get right to the point. Look, Mr. Hel, I’ve been reviewing your case, and if you ask me, you got a raw deal. That’s my opinion anyway.”

Hel let his eyes settle on the young man’s open, frank face. Controlling impulses to reach out and break it, he lowered his eyes and said, “That is your opinion, is it?”

The agent folded up his grin and put it away. He wouldn’t beat around the bush any longer. He would tell the truth. There was an adage he had memorized during his persuasion courses: Don’t overlook the truth; properly handled, it can be an effective weapon. But bear in mind that weapons get blunted with overuse.

He leaned forward and spoke in a frank, concerned tone. “I think I can get you out of here, Mr. Hel.”

“At what cost to me?”

“Does that matter?”

Hel considered this for a moment. “Yes.”

“Okay. We need a job done. You’re capable of doing it. We’ll pay you with your freedom.”

“I have my freedom. You mean you’ll pay me with my liberty.”

“Whatever.”

“What kind of liberty are you offering?”

“What?”

“Liberty to do what?”

“I don’t think I follow you there. Liberty, man. Freedom. You can do what you want, go where you want?”

“Oh, I see. You are offering me citizenship and a considerable amount of money as well.”

“Well… no. What I mean is… Look, I’m authorized to offer you your freedom, but no one said anything about money or citizenship.”

“Let me be sure I understand you. You are offering me a chance to wander around Japan, vulnerable to arrest at any moment, a citizen of no country, and free to go anywhere and do anything that doesn’t cost money. Is that it?”

The agents discomfort pleased Hel. “Ah… I’m only saying that the matter of money and citizenship hadn’t been discussed.”

“I see.” Hel rose. “Why don’t you return when you have worked out the details of your proposal.”

“Aren’t you going to ask about the task we want you to perform?”

“No. I assume it to be maximally difficult. Very dangerous. Probably involving murder. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here.”

“Oh, I don’t think I’d call it murder, Mr. Hel. I wouldn’t use that word. It’s more like… like a soldier fighting for his country and killing one of the enemy.”

“That’s what I said: murder.”

“Have it your own way then.”

“I shall. Good afternoon.”

The agent began to have the impression that he was being handled, while all of his persuasion training had insisted that he do the handling. He fell back upon his natural defense of playing it for the hale good fellow. “Okay, Mr. Hel. I’ll have a talk with my superiors and see what I can get for you. I’m on your side in this, you know. Hey, know what? I haven’t even introduced myself. Sorry about that.”

“Don’t bother. I am not interested in who you are.”

“All right. But take my advice, Mr. Hel. Don’t let this chance get away. Opportunity doesn’t knock twice, you know.”

“Penetrating observation. Did you make up the epigram?”

“I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Very well. And ask the guard to knock on my cell door twice. I wouldn’t want to confuse him with opportunity.”

Back in CIA Far East Headquarters in the basement of the Dai Ichi Building, Hel’s demands were discussed. Citizenship was easy enough. Not American citizenship, of course. That high privilege was reserved for defecting Soviet dancers. But they could arrange citizenship of Panama or Nicaragua or Costa Rica—any of the CIA control areas. It would cost a bit in local baksheesh, but it could be done.

About payment they were more reluctant, not because they had any need to economize within their elastic budget, but a Protestant respect for lucre as a sign of God’s grace made them regret seeing it wasted. And wasted it would probably be, as the mathematical likelihood of Hel’s returning alive was slim. Another fiscal consideration was the expense they would be put to in transporting Hel to the United States for cosmetic surgery, as he had no chance of getting to Peking with a memorable face like that. Still, they decided at last, they really had no choice. Their key-way sort had delivered only one punch card for a man qualified to do the job.

Okay. Make it Costa Rican citizenship and 100 K.

Next problem…

But when they met the next morning in the visitor’s room, the American agent discovered that Hel had yet another request to make. He would take the assignment on only if CIA gave him the current addresses of the three men who had interrogated him: the “doctor,” the MP sergeant, and Major Diamond.

“Now, wait a minute, Mr. Hel. We can’t agree to that sort of thing. CIA takes care of its own. We can’t offer them to you on a platter like that. Be reasonable. Let bygones be bygones. What do you say?”

Hel rose and asked that the guard conduct him back to his cell.

The frank-faced young American sighed and shook his head. “All right. Let me call the office for an okay. Okay?”

“…and I assume Mr. Hel was successful in his enterprise,” Mr. Able said. “For, if he were not, we wouldn’t be sitting about here concerning ourselves with him.”

“That’s correct,” Diamond said. “We have no details, but about four months after he was introduced into China through Hong Kong, we got word that he had been picked up by a bush patrol of the Foreign Legion in French Indo-China. He was in pretty bad shape… spent a couple of months in a hospital in Saigon… then he disappeared from our observation for a period before emerging as a free-lance counterterrorist. We have him associated with a long list of hits against terrorist groups and individuals, usually in the pay of governments through their intelligence agencies.” He spoke to the First Assistant. “Let’s run through them at a high scan rate.”

Superficial details of one extermination action after another flashed up on the surface of the conference table as Nicholai Hel’s career from the early fifties to the mid-seventies was laid out by Fat Boy. Occasionally one or another of the men would ask for a freeze, as he questioned Diamond about some detail.

“Jesus H. Christ!” Darryl Starr said at one point. “This guy really works both sides of the street! In the States he’s hit both Weathermen and tri-K’s; in Belfast he’s moved against both parts of the Irish stew; he seems to have worked for just about everybody except the A-rabs, Junta Greeks, the Spanish, and the Argentines. And did you eyeball the weapons used in the hits? Along with the conventional stuff of handguns and nerve-gas pipes, there were such weirdo weapons as a pocket comb, a drinking straw, a folded sheet of paper, a door key, a light bulb… This guy’d strangle you with your own skivvies, if you wasn’t careful!”

“Yes,” Diamond said. “That has to do with his Naked/Kill training. It has been estimated that for Nicholai Hel, the average Western room contains just under two hundred lethal weapons.”

Starr shook his head and sucked his teeth aloud. “Gettin’ rid of a fella like that would be hardern’ snapping snot off a fingernail.”

Mr. Able paled at the earthy image.

The PLO goatherd shook his head and tished. “I cannot understand these sums so extravagant he receives for his servicing. In my country a man’s life can be purchased for what, in dollars, would be two bucks thirty-five cents.”

Diamond glanced at him tiredly. “That’s a fair price for one of your countrymen. The basic reason governments are willing to pay Hel so much for exterminating terrorists is that terrorism is the most economical means of warfare. Consider the cost of mounting a force capable of protecting every individual in a nation from attack in the street, in his home, in his car. It costs millions of dollars just to search for the victim of a terrorist kidnapping. It’s quite a bargain if the government can have the terrorist exterminated for a few hundred thousand, and avoid the antigovernment propaganda of a trial at the same time.” Diamond turned to the First Assistant. “What is the average fee Hel gets for a hit?”

The First Assistant posed the simple question to Fat Boy. “Just over quarter of a million, sir. That’s in dollars. But it seems he has refused to accept American dollars since 1963.”

Mr. Able chuckled. “An astute man. Even if one runs all the way to the bank to change dollars for real money, their plunging value will cost him some fiscal erosion.”

“Of course,” the First Assistant continued, “that average fee is skewed. You’d get a better idea of his pay if you used the mean.”

“Why is that?” the Deputy asked, pleased to have something to say.

“It seems that he occasionally takes on assignments without pay.”

“Oh?” Mr. Able said. “That’s surprising. Considering his experiences at the hands of the Occupation Forces and his desire to live in a style appropriate to his tastes and breeding, I would have assumed he worked for the highest bidder.”

“Not quite,” Diamond corrected. “Since 1967 he has taken on assignments for various Jewish militant groups without pay—some kind of twisted admiration for their struggle against larger forces.”

Mr. Able smiled thinly.

“Take another case,” Diamond continued. “He has done services without pay for ETA-6, the Basque Nationalist organization. In return, they protect him and his château in the mountains. That protection, by the way, is very effective. We have three known incidents of men going into the mountains to effect retribution for some action of Hel’s, and in each case the men have simply disappeared. And every once in a while Hel takes on a job for no other reason than his disgust at the actions of some terrorist group. He did one like that not too long ago for the West German government. Flash that one up, Llewellyn.”

The men around the conference table scanned the details of Hel’s penetration into a notorious group of German urban terrorists that led to the imprisonment of the man after whom the group was named and the death of the woman.

“He was involved in that?”, Mr. Able asked with a slight tone of awe.

“That was one heavy number,” Starr admitted. “I shit thee not!’”

“Yes, but his highest pay for a single action was in the United States,” Diamond said. “And interestingly enough, it was a private individual who footed the bill. Let’s have that one, Llewellyn.”

“Which one is that, sir?”

“Los Angeles—May of seventy-four.”

As the rear-projection came up, Diamond explained. “You’ll remember this. Five members of a gang of urban vandals and thieves calling themselves the Symbiotic Maoist Falange were put away in an hour-long firefight in which three hundred fifty police SWAT forces, FBI men, and CIA advisers poured thousands of rounds into the house in which they were holed up.”

“What did Hel have to do with that?” Starr asked.

“He had been hired by a certain person to locate the guerrillas and put them away. A plan was worked out in which the police and FBI were to be tipped off, the whole thing timed so they would arrive after the wet work was done, so they could collect the glory… and responsibility. Unfortunately for Hel, they arrived half an hour too early, and he was in the house when they surrounded it and opened fire, along with gas– and firebombing. He had to break through the floor and hide in the crawl space while the place burned down around him. In the confusion of the last minute, he was able to get out and join the mob of officers. Evidently he was dressed as a SWAT man—flack vest, baseball cap, and all.”

“But as I recall,” Mr. Able said, “there were reports of firing from within the house during the action.”

“That was the released story. Fortunately, no one ever stopped to consider that, although two submachine guns and an arsenal of handguns and shotguns was found in the charred wreckage, not one of the three hundred fifty police (and God knows how many onlookers) was so much as scratched after an hour of firing.”

“But it seems to me that I remember seeing a photograph of a brick wall with chips out of it from bullets.”

“Sure. When you surround a building with over three hundred gunhappy heavies and open fire, a fair number of slugs are going to pass in one window and out another.”

Mr. Able laughed. “You’re saying the police and FBI and CIA were firing on themselves?”

Diamond shrugged. “You don’t buy geniuses for twenty thousand a year.”

The Deputy felt he had to come to the defense of his organization. “I should remind you that CIA was there purely in an advisory capacity. We are prohibited by law from doing domestic wet work.”

Everyone looked at him in silence, until Mr. Able broke it with a question for Diamond: “Why did this individual go to the expense of having Mr. Hel do the hit, when the police were only too willing?”

“The police might have taken a prisoner. And that prisoner might have testified in a subsequent trial.”

“Ah, yes. I see.”

Diamond turned to the First Assistant. “Pick up the scan rate and just skim the rest of Hel’s known operations.”

In rapid chronological order, sketches of action after action flashed up on the tabletop. San Sebastian, sponsor ETA-6; Berlin, sponsor German government; Cairo, sponsor unknown; Belfast, sponsor IRA; Belfast, sponsor UDA; Belfast, sponsor British government—and on and on. Then the record suddenly stopped.

“He retired two years ago,” Diamond explained.

“Well, if he is retired…” Mr. Able lifted his palms in a gesture that asked what they were so worried about.

“Unfortunately, Hel has an overdeveloped sense of duty to friends. And Asa Stern was a friend.”

“Tell me. Several times this word ‘stunt’ came up on the printout. I don’t understand that.”

“It has to do with Hel’s system for pricing his services. He calls his actions ‘stunts’; and he prices them the same way movie stunt men do, on the basis of two factors: the difficulty of the job, and the danger of failure. For instance, if a hit is hard to accomplish for reasons of narrow access to the mark or difficult penetration into the organization, the price will be higher. But if the consequences of the act are not too heavy because of the incompetence of the organization against which the action is performed, the price is lower (as in the case of the IRA, for instance, or CIA). Or take a reverse case of that: Hel’s last stunt before retirement. There was a man in Hong Kong who wanted to get his brother out of Communist China. For someone like Hel, this wasn’t too difficult, so you might imagine the fee would be relatively modest. But the price of capture would have been death, so that adjusted the fee upward. See how it goes?”

“How much did he receive for that particular… stunt?”

“Oddly enough, nothing—m money. The man who hired him operates a training academy for the most expensive concubines in the world. He buys baby girls from all over the Orient and educates them in tact and social graces. Only about one in fifty develop into beautiful and skillful enough products to enter his exclusive trade. The rest he simply equips with useful occupations and releases at the age of eighteen. In fact, all the girls are free to leave whenever they want, but because they get fifty percent of their yearly fee—between one and two hundred thousand dollars—they usually continue to work for him for ten or so years, then they retire in the prime of life with five hundred thousand or so in the bank. This man had a particularly stellar pupil, a woman of about thirty who went on the market for quarter-of-a-mil per year. In return for getting the brother out, Hel took two years of her service. She lives with him now at his château. Her name is Hana—part Japanese, part Negro, part Cauc. As an interesting sidelight, this training academy passes for a Christian orphanage. The girls wear dark-blue uniforms, and the women who train them wear nuns’ habits. The place is called the Orphanage of the Passion.”

Starr produced a low whistle. You’re telling me that this squack of Hel’s gets a quarter of a million a year? What’d that come to per screw, I wonder?”

“In your case,” Diamond said, “about a hundred twenty-five thousand.”

The PLO goatherd shook his head. “This Nicholai Hel must be very rich from the point of view of money, eh?”

“Not so rich as you might imagine. In the first place his ‘stunts’ are expensive to set up. This is particularly true when he has to neutralize the government of the country in which the stunt takes place. He does this through the information brokerage of a man we have never been able to locate—a man known only as the Gnome. The Gnome collects damaging facts about governments and political figures. Hel buys this information and uses it as blackmail against any effort on the part of the government to hamper his actions. And this information is very expensive. He also spends a lot of money mounting caving expeditions in Belgium, the Alps, and his own mountains. It’s a hobby of his and an expensive one. Finally, there’s the matter of his château. In the fifteen years since he bought it, he has spent a little over two million in restoring it to its original condition, importing the last of the world’s master stonemasons, wood carvers, tile makers, and what not. And the furniture in the place is worth a couple of million more.”

“So,” Mr. Able said, “he lives in great splendor, this Hel of yours.”

“Splendor, I guess. But primitive. The château is completely restored. No electricity, no central heating, nothing modern except an underground telephone line that keeps him informed of the arrival and approach of any strangers.”

Mr. Able nodded to himself. “So a man of eighteenth-century breeding has created an eighteenth-century world for himself in splendid isolation in the mountains. How interesting. But I am surprised he did not return to Japan and live in the style he was bred to.”

“From what I understand, when he got out of prison and discovered to what degree the traditional ways of life and ethical codes of Japan had been ‘perverted’ by Americanism, he decided to leave. He has never been back.”

“How wise. For him, the Japan of his memory will always remain what it was in gentler, more noble times. Pity he’s an enemy. I would like your Mr. Hel.”

“Why do you call him
my
Mr. Hel?”

Mr. Able smiled. “Does that irritate you?”

“Any stupidity irritates me. But let’s get back to our problem. No, Hel is not as rich as you might imagine. He probably needs money, and that might give us an angle on him. He owns a few thousand acres in Wyoming, apartments in half a dozen world capitals, a mountain lodge in the Pyrenees, but there’s less than half a million in his Swiss bank. He still has the expenses of his château and his caving expeditions. Even assuming he sells off the apartments and the Wyoming land, life in his château would be, by his standards, a modest existence.”

“A life of… what was the word?” Mr. Able asked, smiling faintly to himself at the knowledge he was annoying Diamond.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“That Japanese word for things reserved and understated?”

“Shibumi?”

“Ah, yes. So even without taking any more ‘stunts,’ your—I mean,
our
Mr. Hel would be able to live out a life of
shibumi.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Starr interposed. “Not with nookie at a hundred K a throw!”

“Will you shut up, Starr,” Diamond said.