The handkerchief tightened. At first it just hurt, like something cutting into his neck, and he thought: I can handle this for a while.
He tried to twist away, but they seemed to twist with him. At his first try for air, that helpless try to breathe, he gave a violent lunge and when no air would come into his body, he felt a searing, desperate lust for just one breath. For mercy's sake, one breath. Give him one breath and he would give them anything.
They were chanting. He was dying and they were chanting. Strange sounds. Un-English sounds. Maybe he was too far gone to understand words? Already that far gone?
Darkness, darkness in the room, darkness in his skull, darkness in his convulsing, air-desperate body. And he heard very English words.
"She loves it."
And then, strangely, in the darkness, the deep darkness, there was no need for air, just a great peace upon him with much light, and there was Ethel waiting for him and somehow he knew that now, at this time, she would never tell him he bored her with talk about hardware. Never again would she be bored. She was so happy to see him.
Then he heard a voice, far off somewhere, and it was a promise: "They will not get away with this, these players with the gods of death."
But he didn't care now in this place of light. He didn't even have to tell anyone about hardware. He had forever to be absolutely happy.
Chapter Two
His name was Remo and they had not given him the right breathing equipment. They were going to kill him. He realized it even before the diving boat pulled out from the Flamingo Hotel in Bonaire, a flat jewel of an island in the Netherlands Antilles.
During the winter, Americans and Europeans came here to escape the cold and dive in the turquoise waters and watch the fish of the Caribbean reefs as the fish watched back.
Tourism had been quite profitable to the island, and then someone wanted more profit. So Bonaire became a pumping station in the cocaine pipeline into the United States, and there was so much money, people would kill to protect it. Local police had disappeared, Dutch investigators from Amsterdam had disappeared, but when American assistance personnel disappeared, America told the Antillean government that the United States would take care of it in another way.
Then nothing seemed to happen. No American investigators came down. No intelligence agents came down. And no one in America seemed to know what on earth America had promised. All anyone knew was that it would be taken care of.
A highly placed American assured the Bonaire governor who was his friend:
"I've seen things like this happen before. Usually with the CIA, but sometimes with the FBI or the Secret Service. It's usually something at crisis level and nothing seems to work. Then somebody says: Stop everything, forget it. It will be taken care of."
"And then what happens?" asked the Bonaire governor, his voice a stew of Dutch and English accents on a stock base of African dialects.
"It really gets taken care of."
"By whom?"
"I don't know."
"An agency?"
"I really don't know."
"It must be something," the governor said.
"I don't think it is like anything we know of."
"Then what is it?" the governor insisted.
"I heard of somebody who once had an idea what it was," said the highly placed American.
"Yes?" asked the governor.
"That's it," said the American.
"That's it? You just heard of someone who possibly knew what America was using to solve its unsolvable crises and then nothing more? Who was he?"
"I'm not sure. I just heard," the American said.
"Why didn't you try to find out?" the governor asked.
"Because I heard that they found a finger of his on one continent and a thumb on another. They didn't match prints when they found him, they matched fingers."
"Because he knew?" the governor said.
"I think- I'm not certain- that he was trying to find out who or what this thing was."
"Not certain, eh?" said the Bonaire governor, a bit exasperated at the American who knew so little about what he was talking about. "You don't know who. You don't know what. Would you please be so eminently kind as to tell me just what you do know?"
"I know that if America says it's going to do something to solve your problems, your problems are solved."
"Anything else?"
"Watch out for the falling bodies."
"We don't have any heights here," the governor said.
"Then watch where you step."
Nothing unusual had happened. The usual tourists came down for the usual summer vacation season, and no one noticed another white skin, a man around six feet tall with high cheekbones, death-dark eyes, and thick wrists. They might have noticed that in the three days he was there he ate only once and that was a bowl of unseasoned rice.
Someone did notice that he refused tanning lotion to protect his white skin. They were sure he was going to end up in the hospital, the color of raspberry soda. But no matter how long he stayed in the sun with his skin exposed, he did not burn, nor did he tan, and everyone was sure this man had some sun-blocking lotion, although no one had ever seen him use it and it certainly was invisible.
One cleaning woman who practiced the old religion, honoring African gods as well as the Lord Jesus, wanted to see what this lotion was, this lotion that did not glisten in the sun and did not look like cold cream lathered thick on a porcelain-white body. So she tried to touch him with a finger to see what it was that kept that white skin safe. Later, she would swear that she could not touch him. Every time she reached out a finger toward his body, the skin itself moved, the flesh pulling back away from her touch.
She had the voodoo and she knew the spells and she knew her prophecy and she warned all those who would listen that no one would be harmed if they did not seek to do the white man harm. She said he had the power.
But since she was, after all, only a cleaning lady in the hotel, richer and more powerful men did not listen to her. They were sure, within a day, who that man was. Some sort of American agent setting up some sort of raid. He went to the old slave huts on the windward side of the island to try to set up a deal too large to be trusted. He asked questions that dealers wouldn't ask. He virtually set himself up to be killed. People who could make a million dollars in a week certainly were not going to listen to a warning of a woman who cleaned rooms not to harm him. They were going to harm him. And when he signed up to take the diving excursion, they knew how they were going to harm him.
Remo leaned against the railing of the boat, glancing once at the yellow air tanks set up like huge wine bottles in a wooden rack. One of them was supposed to kill him. He did not know how it was supposed to be done and he might not even understand if someone tried to explain it to him. Mechanical things always seemed to go wrong, and it had gotten worse with the years.
But he did know one of those tanks could kill. He knew it by the way the diving instructor had set it down into the rack. He had been taught to know this, in a learning so deep that he could not imagine not knowing it.
The diving instructor had set the heavy tank down the same way he had lowered the other fifteen tanks of air. Knees bent, arms close to his body, and, kerplunk, metal tank banging down onto wooden rack. So what was different?
How did Remo know that the third tank from the right contained death? How did he know that the very loud diver from Indiana, who said he was part of a diving club, had never used that diving knife he kept waving about? Was it that the man talked too much about "how to disengage from an octopus"? Was rapid, loud talk the tip-off? Was that how Remo knew?
No. Others talked like the man who said he was from Indiana, and Remo knew that they had used their knives in diving. Remo thought about it and finally realized, there on that boat in the Caribbean sun, that he no longer knew how he knew some things. His training had been that good. And if it hadn't, if he had needed to think about such things, then perhaps he would not be alive today.