"—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.
"...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."