"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.
Not quite able to follow what was going on here, the PLO goatherd had risen from the conference table and strayed to the window, where he looked down and watched an ambulance with a flashing dome light thread its way through the partially congealed traffic—as that ambulance did every night at precisely this time. Starr's colorful language had attracted his attention, and he was thumbing through his pocket English/Arabic dictionary, muttering, "Nookie... nookie..." when suddenly the Washington Monument and the wide avenue of cars vanished, and the window was filled with a blinding light.
The goatherd screamed and threw himself to the floor, covering his head in anticipation of the explosion.
Everyone in the room reacted characteristically. Starr leapt up and whipped out his Magnum. Miss Swivven slumped into a chair. The Deputy covered his face with a sheet of typing paper. Diamond closed his eyes and shook his head at these asses with which he was surrounded. Mr. Able examined his cuticles. And the First Assistant, absorbed in his technological intercourse with Fat Boy, failed to notice that anything had happened.
"Get off the floor, for chrissake," Diamond said. "It's nothing. The street-scene film has broken, that's all."
"Yes, but..." the goatherd babbled.
"You came down in the elevator. You must have known you were in the basement."
"Yes, but..."
"Did you think you were looking down from the Sixteenth Floor?"
"No, but..."
"Miss Swivven, shut the rear projector off and make a note to have it repaired." Diamond turned to Mr. Able. "I had it installed to create a better working environment, to keep the office from feeling shut up in the bowels of the earth."
"And you have been capable of fooling yourself?" Starr snapped his gun back into its holster and glared at the window, as though to say it had been lucky... this time.
With ruminantial ambiguity, the goatherd grinned sheepishly as he got to his feet. "Boy-o-boy, that was a good one! I guess the joke was on me!"