But she was shaking her head. “Oh, Hake,” she said sorrowfully, “no, they’re not yours. They’re a lot worse than that.”
Hake held the oar before him like a quarter-staff, but it was apparent that it would not be much use. The two men
were not very big, and certainly not formidably dressed. Like Leota, they wore i minimi. But unlike Leota, they carried guns. The one at the motor had a pistol, the other what looked like a rapid-fire carbine, pointed directly at Hake. It was now obvious that they were the two who had been lounging on the ledge outside; more than that, they had a somewhat familiar look—like someone he had seen somewhere before, and a lot like each other.
“Put your oar down, Horny,” Leota said. “I didn’t mean for this to happen, at all.”
The two men did not only resemble each other, they were almost identical. They had to be twins: tiny dark bodies, no more than five feet three, long straight black hair, neat short beards, black eyes. From under the tarpaulins Hake could see them sitting in the bucket seats on either side of the chattering outboard, Leota draped across the coaming on one side of them. Two well-to-do Eastern gentlemen enjoying the Mediterranean with a pretty girclass="underline" there was nothing in that spectacle to attract anyone’s attention. He could hear the first of the party boats arriving with its tandem flywheels whining away, but one of the men had his foot on Hake’s neck. “Easy, cock,” he said, grinning conventionally. “Don’t try to sit up. You’d just get all those nice people killed.”
“Do what they say, Horny,” said Leota. Hake didn’t answer. With a foot on his windpipe he couldn’t. And what was there to say?
They bounced over the gentle swell for twenty minutes or more. Then the machine-gun sound of the motor slowed, one of the men wrapped a cloth around Hake’s eyes, he was kicked in the small of the back, the tarps were dragged off him and he was prodded up a rope ladder. “Stay on deck, sweetie,” said one of the men in his high, accentless voice—to Leota, Hake assumed. Then one on each side of him they shoved him through a door and down a steep companionway. He heard a door close behind them, and one of the men said: “You can take the blindfold off now. And sit down.”
Hake unwrapped the rag from his face and blinked at them. He was in a low-ceilinged room, bunk beds at either end and a padded locker along the wall, under a porthole covered with a locked metal hatch. There was barely room for all three of them at once. He sat on the locker less because he had been told to than because it was the best way he had of establishing distance between them. But one of them pulled camp chairs from under a bunk, and they drew them up one on each side, facing him.
Then he remembered where he had seen them, or one of them, before. “Munich! When I was sick. I thought you were a doctor.”
“Yes, Hake, that was me. I am Subirama Reddi,” said the one on the left, “and this is my brother Rama. You can tell which is which because I am left-handed and my brother right. We find this useful. Also Rama has a scar over his eye, do you see? He got that from an American in Papeete, and it makes him mean.”
“Oh, no, not mean!” said Rama, shaking his head. “We will get along very well, Hake, provided that you do exactly as we say. Otherwise—” He shrugged, with an expression that was somewhere between a smile and a pout. They spoke perfect English, colloquial and quick if sometimes odd. It was not quite true that they had no accents. The accents were there, but they were not identifiable. To Hake, they sounded vaguely British, but he thought that to a Brit they would have seemed American—as though they had come from somewhere along the mid-Atlantic ridge, or perhaps from Yale. Their voices were as high and pure as lead tenors in a boy’s choir, though what they said was not childish. “What you must do,” Rama Reddi went on, “is to tell us completely and quickly all of the names of the agents you have worked with, and what you know of the operations of your agency.”.
This was not going to be a pleasant time, Hake realized. And it was all foolish, because he knew so little! He turned to Rama and began, “There isn’t much I can tell—” The next word was jolted out of his mouth as Subirama’s fist hit his ear. Hake turned toward him in rage, and Rama’s fist clubbed him on the other side. It was now clear why their opposing handedness was useful.
Subirama moved his chair back a few inches, and switched the gun he had been holding in his free hand to his good one. He spoke rapidly to his brother, who nodded and produced a rope. While Rama Reddi was tying Hake’s hands, Subirama said, “You Americans are very confident of your size and strength. I do not, actually, think you could prevail against either one of us in bare-hand combat, much less two. But I think that you might attempt something which would make it necessary for us to kill you. So we will remove temptation.” He waited until his brother had finished with Hake’s hands, and then drove his fist into Hake’s stomach. “Now,” he said conversationally, “we will start ‘with the names of the persons you have contacted in Italy so far.”
Before they were through Hake had told them everything they asked for. He did not try to resist, after the first few minutes. As long as they confined themselves to beating him he might survive, and even recover; but they made it clear that if he held out it would cost him his fingernails, his eyes and his life, in that order. He gave them names he didn’t know he remembered. All four of Yosper’s helpers. Every member of his class Under the Wire. He even gave a physical description of the woman who had led him to his first interview at Lo-Wate Bottling Co. and the sheep-herder who had driven him to the airport bus. He could not tell which parts interested them. When some name or event led them to demand more information, he did not see why. Why would they care about a Hilo avocado-grower’s wife? But they questioned him endlessly about Beth Hwa. He told them what he knew, everything he knew, some of it four and five times. Then they let him rest. Hake didn’t think they were being considerate. He thought their fists were sore.
He would have resisted more, he told himself, if he had had anything to resist for. But the talk with Leota had shaken him again: what was he doing working for the Team in the first place? Why had he left a perfectly comfortable, personally rewarding and socially useful life as a minister in New Jersey to involve himself in these desperate adolescent games? He climbed into one of the bunks, hungry, exhausted, feeling sick and in pain. He could not believe sleep would be possible, his head pounded so. Then he woke up with Leota sitting on the bunk beside him and realized he had been asleep after all.
“These are aspirins, take them,” she said.
He pushed her away and himself up, his head thundering lethally. “Get lost,” he snarled. “This is the bad-cop and good-cop routine, right? I saw it on television.”
“Oh, Hake! You are so terribly ignorant. The boys are bad, bad enough to kill you, more likely than not. And I’m good. Mostly good,” she corrected herself, holding out the pills. She put an arm behind his head while he drank the water to swallow them, and said, “You look like hell.”
He didn’t answer. He sat on the edge of the bunk for a moment, then tottered to the tiny toilet and closed the door behind him. In the mirror he looked even worse than he felt. His face was puffed out from chin to hairline; his eyes were swollen half shut, and his ears rang. He splashed cold water on it, but when he tried drying his face with a scrap of towel it hurt. He moved his lips and cheek muscles experimentally. He could talk, and maybe even chew; but it was going to be some time before he could enjoy it.
When he came out Leota was gone, but reappeared in a moment with a tray. She closed the door behind her, and Hake heard someone outside lock it. “Your friends are taking good care of me,” he said bitterly.