Shibumi (40 page)

“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.”

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.