‘My first job — my initiation, as Thornley called it — paid me twenty-five thousand dollars.
“Who’s the mark?” I asked.
‘And Thornley says, “Coalhelms.”
‘Just like that. I could hardly get my wits together, it’s that shocked I was. Finally I says to him, “Why? Other than he’s an insufferable little squeeker.”
“You never need to know the why of a thing,” Thornley says. “If it’s to be done, there’s a reason for it. But since it’s your first time out e’ us, I’ll tell you this much: he’s outlived his usefulness. He’s proved to be a baa security risk for your people.”
“They’re your people, too,” I said.
“Not anymore,” he says. “Nor yours, either, after tonight.”
‘Actually, Coalhelms was nothing more than a test.
“And just who in hell runs this club?” I asked.
‘And that was the first time I ever heard of Chameleon.’
Bang!
The line on the port side twanged loose from its outrigger and screamed through the reeclass="underline" aweee-aweee-aweee-aweee...
It was a game fish, breaching long enough to jump high in the air once, then spitting out the hock. O’Hara used the momentary distraction to try to correlate everything Falmouth was saying.
He ignored the brief fishing drama, concentrating instead on the steady throb of the motors, using the sound as a kind of mantra, slipping briefly into a trancelike form of meditation. Kimura called it shidasu hakamaru, ‘going to the wall.’
To O’Hara, it was like being in a bright white room with no seams or doors. Against this glaring white milieu he projected images and words, imbedding them in his memory. He had only a vague visual recollection of Thornley, but there were others he knew:
Gazinsky, the tall Russian with the cadaverous head and eyes like a cat, always a bit of food in his beard; Tosiru Kirmoto, the Buddha-like Japanese with his three-piece suits and white-on-white shirts, who had once blown up four Russian missile pads and got out without losing his breath; Amanet, the sleek, black-haired little Savak terrorist, whom he once saw in Algiers, drinking fresh goat’s blood as if it were a cocktail.
Then there was the Frenchman, Le Croix. Tall, short, fat, thin? He had no visual impression of the man other than that he had once heard Le Croix had lost an eye in the fighting in Algeria and had exacted a terrible price for it — he had personally executed twenty-two Algerian rebels.
Finally, there was Daniov the Jeweller, whom he had seen only through binoculars, strolling through the Tuileries in Paris. ‘Remember that face,’ his partner had told him, ‘he is one of the most dangerous men in the Game. And watch the umbrella. There’s an air-injection needle in the tip, loaded with poison. He can hit you right through your overcoat.’
O’Hara remembered Daniov welclass="underline" short, squat, a face round as a cabbage, pencil-thin moustache, thick glasses accentuating gleaming, beady eyes tucked among thick folds of flesh, his tongue, a snake’s tongue, constantly licking nervously at his lips, as though sensing some unsuspecting prey nearby. And the omnipresent black umbrella with its pinhead of death lurking in the tip.
The images would remain, as well as the imagery of Falmouth trapped in a nightmare of his own making, performing a pagan ritual of death as his ‘initiation.’
The concept was terrifying, the Players, themselves, proving the Game far more dangerous than he had imagined.
‘Christ, didn’t I teach ya better’n that?’ Cap’n K. barked from the bridge. The big fish had thrown the line and was gone.
The captain throttled back and came to the stern and baited the big hook again. ‘Ya didn’t snag him ,‘he said irritably. ‘That was a two-hundred-pounder there, Tony. Two-hundred-pounder!’
‘We’re talking business,’ Tony said, setting the line and clamping it by clothespin to the outrigger.
‘Fishin’ and talkin’ don’t mix,’ snapped the captain. He returned to the bridge and slammed the throttles forward.
The activity jarred O’Hara back to reality. He waited until Falmouth was back in his chair.
‘Did you really burn Coalhelms?’ he asked.
Falmouth looked at O’Hara, his gray eyes turning flinty for just a moment, then he nodded. ‘That I did, Sailor.’
‘Why?
‘It was just like any other job.’
‘For twenty-five thousand dollars?’
‘That’s not the point.’
Falmouth’s candour shocked O’Hara. ‘The point! Why didn’t you just go to M15, turn Thornley up for the deserter he is?’
Falmouth seemed to collapse in the middle. His shoulders sagged. His face drew in, the creases around his eyes and mouth growing deeper. His voice was haunted, the voice of a man whose sins were parading past him, the bodiless faces of his victims hovering before his eyes.
‘Look,’ he said finally, ‘I’m tired, okay? I’m pushing fifty. I don’t run as fast as once I did. Nor jump as high, nor move as quick. You can’t stay tops in the Game much past forty. You forget things. Your eyes start to go. You don’t have the stamina you once had. Your reflexes are shot. ‘You Start making little mistakes now and again. Not fatal ones, hut when it happens, that black angel whispers in your ear just the same.’
‘Christ, there must’ve been something you could—’
‘You just don’t get it, do you, man? ‘You’re trying to make a moral issue where there are no morals. Dontcha see, lad, I had no choice. You bet your sweet lovin’ ass I did it. And thankful I did now, or I’d be long gone. You don’t retire from this bunch. You botch it, try to get out, you’re a dead man. What I’m saying, Sailor, you retire in a box and that’s the only way. Well, I ain’t lookin’ to get laid out in McGinty’s front room with a hole in me. I’ve always planned on dying in bed. So forget the moral judgments, hey? We’re not here for judging, we’re here to pop their balloon. You blow this operation open, and I’m a free man. Otherwise I’m on the dodge for the rest of my life, which is not a thing I have a taste for right now.’
There were a few moments of uneasy silence.
‘It isn’t easy, you know, admitting you’re losing your edge, when that’s all you’ve got.’
And more silence. Is this really it? O’Hara wondered. Is it that simple? Is Tony too scared to resist some nameless, faceless assassin in the dark? Or is there more to it? Some kind of plot? He examined his own paranoia, but found no answers. Falmouth’s self-entrapment made as much sense as anything else so far in his chilling yarn.
He changed the subject. ‘What’s the objective of all this and who the hell’s Chameleon?’
Falmouth leaned back, closed his eyes and let the sun bake his face. The pain of admitting that he was growing too old for the Game faded slowly from his handsome features. ‘The objective is greed.’
‘What companies are involved?’
‘The biggest in the world. Our enemies are their competition. If the enemy’s got somethin your client wants, steal it. If you can’t steal it, kill the ones who’re doing the work.
‘Blow up their laboratories. Burn ‘em out. Slow them down.
Drive ‘em out of business. Steal their secrets. Our clients?
Hell, you name it. United Telephone, Continental Motor
Company, Sunset Oil, the Boston Common Bank and Trust,
Global Steel...’
He waved his hands to indicate the futility of listing them
Talk, O’Hara thought. So far Falmouth had given him very little but talk. Nothing could be proven. ‘All I’m hearing is talk,’ he said.
‘All right, how about Guardio, the South American strong man. Did you hear about his assassination while you were on the dodge?’
‘They do have newspapers in Japan, Tony,’ O’Hara said, managing a smile.
‘The whole coup was set up by Chameleon.’
‘You said this was non-political.’