by Howard Fast
“You are a handsome man, Breckner,” she said. “I like to be with a handsome man. It makes me feel my body. Do you think I am beautiful?”
“Yes.”
“Then why haven’t you said so?”
“Because I don’t care.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“You’re much more beautiful when you don’t speak,” I told her. “You bore me.”
She was hard enough and tough enough to kill me, and the hatred in her narrowed eyes was something to see, but she could still smile because she was well trained.
“We have a matrimonial bed in our suite,” she said, smiling at me. “Shall I change it?”
“I think I’ll drive back to Zurich tonight. As I told you, I am bored.”
“You told me that I bored you,” she corrected.
“It’s the same thing. I’ll take the Mercedes.”
“I can’t do that. You know that. If you want to go back tonight, I’ll drive you back.”
She drove me back to Zurich that night. It was one of those crystal-clear beautiful Swiss nights, the air like wine. Once during the ride she said, “You’re old, Breckner. I think I understand.” I am forty-seven. Her efforts to reach me or hurt me were childish and I let the remark go.
A week later Grupperman brought up the subject, remarking that my Swiss vacation had apparently not gone well.
“No. Not well.”
“You have to have a talent for vacations,” Grupperman said. “You have a talent for other things, Breckner. Please believe that we do not suspect you of being a homosexual. Allow me to amend that. Suspect is the wrong word. When you work in The Department, we know enough about your past not to speculate. How long is it since you have been with a woman?”
“About four years,” I said.
Grupperman leaned back behind his desk, clasped his hands over his enormous stomach, and observed me thoughtfully. The two of us sat in silence, and the silence went on and on. I had nothing to say to him, and obviously he was thinking about what he would say. He took a box of cigars out of his desk and offered me one, which I declined.
“A curious man—no vices at all, Breckner?”
He lit his cigar and puffed with pleasure. “I have many vices,” he said. “Cigars, rich food; women—and a list of others which I do not specify. No one condemns one’s vices, so long as one does not admit to having them. What do you know about Dahu Sind?”
“Nothing.”
“I mean, for example, little boys,” he said, shelving the question and answer. “Some of my friends are intrigued by little boys—a very old and fascinating vice. But if they were to admit it in the company of their peers?”
He watched me, playing his own game.
“Dahu Sind,” he said, smiling. “You astonish me, Breckner. Do you really have no interest in politics?”
“I know who he is. He’s the Under-Secretary of the United Nations. You asked me what I know about him. I know nothing about him.”
“Politics, Breckner, is the thought process, the mentation of mankind. The political man is the high man—I hesitate to use the word superman—and you and I, Breckner, willy-nilly, we are the political man. I am, you are. You may say to yourself, There is Grupperman. I am. But the questions follow, do they not? Who is Grupperman? How is he? Why is he? Have you asked yourself that?”
“No,” I answered. “I have not.”
“Ah! Do you know what I like most in you, Breckner?”
I waited.
“Your blunt, direct honesty. You say what is in your mind. You do not dissemble. In a way, your secret is my secret. We are both political creatures, and yet you appear to have no interest in politics. Yet we both think politically. If you ask, Where is Grupperman’s strength, his brilliance, his insight? the answer is that he thinks politically. Cleaver perished because he ceased to think politically. He became a creature of hate and emotion. But you think politically, and yet you want to exclude politics from your world. Why?”
“I don’t understand politics,” I replied.
“Then we shall teach you, because you are valuable. Dahu Sind is also valuable—but not to us. To others. The Russians are masters at the game of politics, and therefore they are absorbed by chess. Do you play chess, Breckner?”
“Long ago. I was not terribly good.” I remembered that I had played with my wife. After she died, I never played again.
“Chess would be pointless if you did not take the other men and remove them. In essence, it is most political because it does away with verbiage and dross. To the point, it removes what must be removed.”
“Dahu Sind,” I said.
“Have you ever had a thought about him, an image of him, an attitude toward him?”
“No.”
“Have you ever seen him?”
“Only his pictures.”
I was standing in front of Grupperman’s chrome-plated desk, and now he chuckled and told me to sit down in a small, free-form white chair that was cast out of a single piece of plastic. Sistine, who decorated his office, was German, although not too many people knew that, and like so many Germans he appeared to evade beauty and good taste by a hair’s-breadth. You cocked your head, and what was appropriate appeared ridiculous. The chair I sat in was ridiculous, and it upset me to feel ridiculous.
“He is a man of peace,” said Grupperman.
“Yes,” I agreed indifferently.
“That evokes no other reaction from you?”
“Should it?”
“He will be in Geneva in three days and will be staying at the Lorraine. They always give him the same suite, overlooking the lake, a very simple suite with a bedroom, a small sitting room, and a kitchen. His secretary—who always travels with him—prepares his food, and unless it is a necessary diplomatic occasion, he dines in his rooms, very simply on brown rice, a little fish, and plain water. He takes neither tea nor coffee nor any alcoholic beverage, nor does he smoke. No vices, Breckner, which at least in one way makes him curiously like yourself.”
“Will he be guarded? Is the secretary armed?”
“Oh, no indeed. Goodness, no,” Grupperman responded. “Do you know, Breckner, you have violated your reputation. Two questions.”
“I am sorry.”
“Nonsense. The rule against questions simply alerts the listener. If we allowed questions, then who would listen? How much better to be preoccupied with one’s own questions. But people like Dahu Sind are never guarded. They have a childish faith in their own immunity from harm. The secretary is a Bengali, only five feet and one inch tall, very frail, and never armed. Goodness, no. But you will not be troubled with the secretary. Between eight and ten in the morning Sind takes two hours for meditation. During that time the secretary does his shopping for the day, buys the daily papers, and does whatever else he must do in his free time. Dahu Sind prefers to be alone during those two hours, and the door to his suite will be unlocked.”
“Unlocked? By us?”
“By him. It is a part of what he calls his meditation. So you can see this is very simple. Go to Paris the day after tomorrow and spend a day there, and then take the early plane to Geneva. It leaves Paris at five forty-five in the morning, so you will be at Geneva in ample time. There will be a car waiting and you will be driven to the Lorraine. You will do what you must do, and the car will wait, and then you will return to the airport. You should have a full hour before the secretary finds him.”
“And what weapon?” I asked.
“The Schmidt, I think. Don’t you agree?”
I nodded.
“With a silencer, of course.”
I nodded again, and Grupperman stared at me for a while, his lips pursed thoughtfully. “Very well,” he said finally. “This has been a most interesting chat, Breckner. You may go now.”
As I opened the door, Grupperman was blowing a bit of ash from the shining surface of his chrome-plated desk.
Chapter 4
AT Cointrin Airport I had to
wait for a while, and I was chilled. No one had told me that an early morning in Geneva at this time of the year could be so bitterly cold. A sharp wind blew, and clouds fled like panicked sheep across the steel-colored sky. My instructions were to wait outside the building, and I was standing there shivering when a young man in a chauffeur’s uniform strode up and said cheerfully, “I’m Haberstrom, your driver. They call me Strom. You’re Breckner, of course.”
“You’re damn sure of yourself.”
“Oh, come—I have seen twenty of your pictures, and I have watched film of you. I know how you walk. Really, nobody can disguise his walk. I could spot you from the back without ever seeing your face.” He smiled ingenuously. “You’re a sort of hero of mine.”
I fell into a walk beside him, letting him take my suitcase, a small one-suiter that I always keep with me when I travel. There is a rule in The Department against separating oneself from one’s luggage or ever having to wait for it.
“You’re cold,” he noticed. “We have a beautiful Rolls—I love to drive a Rolls. It has the best heating system, you know, and practically the best of everything else. Warm as toast in two minutes.”
He had an aptitude for saying the wrong thing, and I remarked nastily that his taste in heroes left something to be desired.
“You’re just the way they said you would be. I really think I know you, Breckner.” He held the door of the Rolls open, a discreet black car, expensive and quiet and powerful, the way Department cars are everywhere.
“If you knew me,” I said shortly, “you would know that the last thing I enjoy is the chatter of an ass like you. Your job is to drive this car. I trust you will drive it competently.”
He said no more after that but drove me straight to the hotel. You step out of a black, ten-thousand-pound Rolls-Royce, wearing a suit that is London cut, with a two-hundred-franc French shirt, a six-thousand-lire Italian tie, and Italian shoes hand made for thirty thousand lire, and there is small question of who you are and what is your business. When I gave him the number of the floor, the man in the elevator lacked the courage to ask my destination but only whether I was expected. I told him that I was.
And as I had been told, the door to Dahu Sind’s suite was unlocked. I walked in. Across from the door as you entered was a wide window overlooking the lake. The morning sun just touched the lake but ate with eager fingers of fire at the Alps in the distance, and facing this, Dahu Sind sat on the floor, his legs crossed, and said to me softly, as I stood behind him, “Perhaps you are in the wrong room. I do not like to be interrupted at my meditation. Perhaps you will return later.”
I stood for a moment; then I took the Schmidt out of one pocket and the silencer out of the other. This I did quietly. There was no sound of metal, but without moving or turning his head, Dahu Sind said, “Then it is no mistake and you are an assassin.” He said this so matter-of-factly that the simple statement shook me as nothing had in a long time. His voice was low, even, and without hate or fear.
“How do you know I am an assassin?”
“You have a gun in your hand. Who else would come here with a gun?”
I told myself that he had seen my reflection in the window. I could see no reflection there, but perhaps from his angle upon the floor the light refracted differently.
“Come here where I can face you,” he said, and I found myself walking forward until at last I stood between him and the window. He did not look at me at first. Either his eyes were closed or they were fixed on the rug in front of him, and in either case I could see only his dropped lids. Then he raised his eyes and looked at me.
His eyes were dark and thoughtful and his face was as round as a moon, but quite thin. It was the skull and the jawbone that gave it the round shape, not flesh. His hands, clasped on his lap in front of him, were curiously small and shapely, and his crossed legs were twisted into the lotus position. He wore a cotton robe of plain muslin and his feet were bare, and he studied me for a long moment before he asked, “What is that thing in your left hand?”
“A silencer.” I snapped it into place on the muzzle of the Schmidt.
“And what is your name, assassin?”
“Don’t call me assassin,” I snapped. “I am no assassin.”
“Then what are you?”
“I am a man who does his work. It’s my work. I earn my pay, the way other men do.”
“Yes, I can see why you would look at it that way. But what is your name?”
“Breckner.”
“And who sent you here, Breckner?”
“Why are you asking me questions? Don’t you understand that I am going to kill you?”
“I understand that.”
“Then what difference will your questions or their answers make?”
“What difference—exactly,” he said softly. “Why not tell me, Breckner?”
“The Department.”
“Yes. Yes, indeed. I had thought they would, sooner or later. They have such supreme confidence in death.”
Without knowing why I said it, I specified that this was nothing I enjoyed.
“Do you always apologize, Mr. Breckner?”
“God damn you, what kind of a damn spook are you!”
Dahu Sind shrugged and smiled slightly.
“Don’t you understand that I am going to kill you?”
“Yes.”
“Then God damn you, why aren’t you afraid?”
“Should I be afraid?”
“Yes! Yes!”
“Do you need me to be afraid, Breckner?”
“You would have been dead already. Do you imagine that I am afraid to kill you? Or that I hesitate to?”
He dropped his eyes and opened his hands in his lap, as if he were studying what lay in his palms, and as the moments ticked by my own anger and irritation increased. Still I did not kill him.
“Why are you afraid, Breckner?” he asked at last, raising his eyes to me.
“Me!”
“Men die, Breckner. That is the forlorn necessity of being a man.”
“I’m not afraid of you!”
“Breckner, Breckner—I am half your size, and you have a gun in your hand. Of course you are not afraid of me.”
“I am going to kill you,” I told him, feeling somehow that he did not understand. “I have to kill you. Here. Now.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Aren’t you afraid to die?”
“No.”
“Why? Why aren’t you afraid?”
“You asked me that before,” said Dahu Sind. “I was not afraid to be born.”
“What in hell kind of an answer is that?”
“All the answer there is, Breckner.”
And then I shot him. I shot him through the heart, a downward shot, and then three more times to shatter the delusion that he could not die. The Schmidt barked quietly, like an eager little dog, and Dahu Sind lay there dead. I then removed the silencer from the Schmidt and put the gun and silencer in my pockets and left the room. No one stopped me, and Haberstrom was waiting with the Rolls where I had left him, the motor of the car purring like a happy cat.
“Well, you certainly damn well took your time,” said Haberstrom as I got into the car, and when I didn’t dignify that with an answer, he must have felt that I was offended and he asked me how it went.
“Your job is to drive me, you little son of a bitch,” I replied.
He had just pulled away from the hotel, and his shrill and sudden response as he jammed on the brake was that no one talked to him like that.
“I do.”
“You know what that buys you, Breckner—” he began, but I took the Schmidt out of my pocket and touched his spine with it and explained that it meant not one damn thing to me whether I killed him or not.
“This is Breckner,” I said. “Sitting right here behind you with a gun in your back. Have you ever seen anyone die from a shattered spine, Haberstrom?”
He began to drive and splutter and apologize, but I told him to
shut up and that he made me ill. When we stopped at the airport, he doubled over and began to vomit in the Rolls, all over himself and the wheel and the polished dashboard. I left him and went into the waiting room, and twelve minutes later my plane took off. There was no hue and cry, but there rarely was a hue and cry when The Department planned something.
Usually, when I do a job, I don’t read the papers. I don’t have that kind of ego. But this time I took the papers and spent the next day reading about the man I killed. I was left undisturbed for a day, but that was more or less the normal practice of The Department, and it meant neither approval nor censure.
The newspapers said that the man I had killed was a symbol of peace and civilization. Dahu Sind had apparently devoted his entire life toward the cause of peace among the nations. He had been a Buddhist, and the newspapers said that he had never expressed hate toward another human being. The Swiss government—utterly abashed because a thing like this had happened in one of the most peace-loving and advanced countries on earth—declared a week of national mourning and expressed its deepest and most heartfelt apologies to Marabu, the country of Dahu Sind’s birth. However, the Prime Minister of Marabu, speaking on an international television-satellite hookup, weeping as he spoke, said that no country could claim Dahu Sind, that he had belonged to the company of man and that his voice had always been the voice of all mankind. The international program, originating from the United Nations in New York City and then moving from country to country, lasted for three hours; and though I was quite exhausted, I remained awake until two o’clock in the morning, so that I might see all of it. The President of the United States spoke, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, and of course de Gaulle for France and Franco for Spain. Even the Russians paid tribute to Dahu Sind. But the most moving tribute was delivered by Dr. Smith-Chandler, the head of The Department, who said, “What the world has lost, no man can assess, for there is no scale upon which the human spirit can be weighed.” I had never met Dr. Smith-Chandler, who was a liar. I was not a liar.