“You know it wouldn’t.”
“Why are you at Columbia, Levy?”
“It’s a good school.”
“Better answer, please.”
“Because you’re here.”
“Well, that’s certainly better, and it’s also obviously more flattering, but it’s also only, I suspect, partly true. Naturally, I checked your records today. I check anyone who deems himself worthy of my ministrations. Do you find me arrogant, Levy?”
“Oh, no sir.”
“Your father did. He used to chastise me constantly. You went to Denison; if I’m not mistaken, that’s one of those coed pits in Ohio.”
“They phrase it differently in their brochure, sir.”
“And you won a Rhodes.”
Levy nodded.
“A Rhodes Scholar. From Denison. You must be extraordinarily bright to do that—all the Rhodeses I know went to Ivy League universities. How did you manage such a feat, Levy?”
“I don’t know, sir, I just applied. It was most likely a weak year.”
“Most likely. That would account for it. I imagine they must have gone mad at Denison. There’s no doubt in my mind you must have been the first winner in the history of the school.”
Levy sat there.
“Probably the first even to apply.”
Levy said nothing.
Biesenthal let him sit there a long time before asking again, quietly, “Why are you at Columbia, Levy?”
“Just the way things worked out,” Levy mumbled.
“That is not just the way things work out, Levy. Because your father was also a Rhodes and your father attended that same coed pit in Ohio and he also came here for his doctorate. There’s a line in a James Bond novel, Levy—‘the first time it’s coincidence, the second time it’s happenstance, the third time it’s enemy action.’ ”
Levy was perspiring badly. If I ever run to class again I should really be put away, he tried telling himself, but it didn’t work, because that wasn’t why he was perspiring, not now.
“The McCarthy section is central to your dissertation, yes?”
“Hard to say, sir, seeing as it’s not exactly what you might call written yet.”
“The McCarthy section is central to your dissertation, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Very worrying, Levy.”
“It’s just a dissertation, Professor Biesenthal.”
“You can’t fill his footsteps, I’m sorry to tell you. You may end up leaving larger tracks, anything’s possible, but they will be your own, not your father’s.”
“Look—I’m here—you want the truth, I’ll tell you the truth—I’m here because I got the best scholarship offer here and that’s all there is to it. I’m not on any crusade, nothing like that.”
“Good. Because it’s been too long, there’s nothing you can do to clear him.”
“I know that, because there’s nothing to clear, he was innocent.” Levy glanced quickly up at Biesenthal.
The damn eyes would not stop blazing ...
4
SCYLLA NEVER DID HIS best work in London. Not because he disliked the place. The reverse. Even when he first visited it, years before, he had somehow sensed that it ought to have been his home. His affection for the city had only increased throughout the decade of his twenties.
Then, when he was thirty, he met Janey in London and fell very much in love. That was the clincher. Now, no matter how important the work he was supposed to be doing, he could never quite force the necessary concentration. He and Janey had been an item for five years now, and even though he had yet to meet the passion that could survive five years of intimacy, things were still plenty good as far as Scylla was concerned. This very evening he had wandered after dinner along Mount Street, window-shopping and thinking of Janey back home, and then he was singing “A Foggy Day in London Town” out loud. He caught himself before he got too far into it, and no one else was near enough to hear his serenading, but it still indicated that he wasn’t paying quite the attention to work that was necessary if you intended staying alive.
He glanced at his watch. It was damn cold, and it was September and almost half-past three in the morning. He blew on his hands a moment, then pulled his trench coat collar up tighter around his neck. He had bought the thing from Burberry’s years ago, and he knew it was cornball, but what the hell.
He sat quietly, waiting. Waiting was something you got used to. He hated it, but sometimes you made other people wait; it set them on edge, so you did it. Any advantage was worth whatever it cost you. It was strange, but he disliked making other people wait just as much as he disliked being kept waiting himself. But he did not any more allow it to disturb him. They were trying for an advantage, and when they did appear it would be natural for him to seem nervous, anxious, even irritable, so they would think the advantage was theirs. Of course, once you had them thinking that, the advantage was yours again. That was what made him as good as anybody; he gave away nothing.
At least, when he was on his game. But in London that was never quite the case. He was vulnerable in London, though no one had yet been able to turn that vulnerability to their benefit.
Three thirty-five.
Scylla shifted his position again; the bench was simply not meant for long-distance sitting. He glanced off through the black green of Kensington Gardens to the Albert Memorial. What a gloriously supreme monument to bad taste. Ordinarily he loved it, but not when he was freezing his ass off in the middle of the goddamn night on a bullshit job like this one.
Earlier that day he had offered the Russians a blueprint for a crucial section of the “smart bomb” that the military was creaming over these days, a bomb that didn’t just drop: It glided until it found its prearranged target; then it fell. What made it such a bullshit job was that the Russians already had the blueprint of the crucial section. Only they couldn’t let us know they had it, so they would have to come to the park and agree to buy it, and after a certain amount of haggling the deal would be made. It was really all so 1984 you could throw up.
Footsteps.
Scylla took his glance from the Albert Memorial, stared across the walk to the empty bench opposite. The silly part was coming up now. No matter how long he had played the game, he could never get over a kindergartenlike desire to giggle when they went through the business with the code words. Dear God, who else might be meeting on park benches at 3:39 in the morning?
Don’t answer that.
A delicate-looking girl sat down across from him in the darkness. Odd on several counts: (a) sex; (b) that they would entrust something of such supposed importance to a lady as edgy as this one. Oh, she seemed calm enough; if you weren’t expert, you might assume she was placid. But Scylla could sense the pounding of her heart.
She held out a package of cigarettes, toward him.
He shook his head. “Cancerous.” Jesus, there it was again, building inside him, a giggle. What if he hadn’t said “cancerous”? What if he’d just said “Sorry, luv, I don’t smoke.” Would she have gone away? Of course not. He was sitting where he was supposed to be sitting at the time he was supposed to be sitting there. Lunacy, really. If he was ever put in charge, the first thing he was going to do away with was passwords.
She lit her cigarette. “It’s a hard habit to break.”
“Otherwise it wouldn’t be a habit,” Scylla said. And with that he breathed a sigh. At least the silly part was done with.
She stayed smoking on her bench a while, inhaling too deeply. “You are Scylla?” she said finally.
Well dear God, who did she think he was after all this? Her lack of skill was beginning to gall him. He had done far too much to have to deal with lackeys and fools. He said nothing, only nodded.
“I thought you might be female.”
I thought you might be male, he almost replied, which, of course, was true; so, of course, he couldn’t. He said nothing.
“Was not Scylla a female monster?”
; “Scylla was a rock. A rock near a whirlpool. Charybdis was the whirlpool.”
“And are you that? A rock?”
He was. On his good days, anyway. He said nothing. He knew now that she was stalling. But he did not know if it was because she was inept and new, or for some other reason.
“I am instructed to say that your price is too high.”
“Are you also instructed to negotiate?” She was really very pretty, in a delicate way. He was conscious of his body, thick and muscular.
She nodded her head. “Of course.”
“Well then, for Chrissakes, negotiate, make a counter offer, that’s what negotiating is.”
“Of course.” She nodded her head again.
She was so panicked sitting there, she could not keep that from him no matter how she tried; it was as if someone were trying to kill her, and then his brain belatedly sent the message through—not her—not her—it’s you someone’s trying to kill—
And if luck is the residue of design, then he was lucky, because by instinct he raised his right hand to his throat, getting it there a brief second before the garroting wire, and as the wire pulled tight, cutting his palm terribly, Scylla thought that it would never happen now, not here, in London, but that was the logical place when you came down to it, except that logic would not explain away one fact, namely that even when he was slightly off his game, it was not possible to come up in total silence behind him, no one possessed that kind of quiet skill. And as the wire tore deeper into his palm and his brain began fogging, Scylla managed to realize that he was wrong, there was one person, and it had to be Chen, fragile and deadly, S. L. Chen the wonder, who was behind him, killing him now ...
When he found out it was Scylla, Chen was pleased. Not out of any sense of overconfidence, but rather one of the inevitable. Eventually, it had to come down to Chen versus Scylla, better now than later, better with the attack being his to initiate rather than the other way around. In all honesty, Chen’s ideal would have been to put them both in a bare room, naked save for loincloths, and let one survive. But that was not to be. Still, when he found out it was Scylla, Chen was pleased.
He was not pleased with the setup. Nothing wrong with the darkness, nothing wrong with the park or the time of night. It was the time of year that was going to prove troublesome. Chen knew that instantly. If it had been summer, then possibly Scylla might have appeared in just slacks and a shirt, and his neck would have been vulnerable to hands. But in September there was no doubt that Scylla would be in a coat, that it would undoubtedly be chilly, which meant the odds were high that the coat collar would be turned up, and if you could not see the death spots in the neck, you could miss them, causing only pain, which might give Scylla a chance to retaliate. Perhaps even win.
Chen was very much against that, so he decided to use his nunchaku.
It was an honorable weapon, ancient as air: two hard wooden sticks connected by a wire, or leather if you liked leather.
Chen liked wire.
He was a master with the nunchaku, and to the Caucasian world the strangeness of the weapon lent it an aura of fear. Noonchuck, the whites called it. Never let Chen get his noonchuck on you.
Then came the Kung Fu movie craze, and Bruce Lee used the nunchaku, and, before Chen’s horrified eyes, the sacred thing became a toy for delinquents all across the globe. In Los Angeles children used noonchunks. In Liverpool they were becoming common. Common. It was humiliating. Chen went to all the Bruce Lee movies and writhed.
Chen had arrived at 2:30 for the Scylla encounter. He knew the girl was to arrive at 3:30 but would be nine minutes late, to nettle the big man. Chen assumed that Scylla would arrive by 3—Chen always arrived at least that early for any confrontation, and he would have been surprised had Scylla not done the same. At 2:30, Chen made a brief but thorough examination of the shadow patches behind the bench Scylla was to occupy, and found the one he considered best—it combined a certain closeness with bushes that would not reveal anything even if there was sudden strong wind.
And then he went into his crouch.
Chen could crouch for ... how long? A day? Certainly a day, that had been the most time he had ever spent immobile. Probably he could last longer. Perhaps there would come a time when it would be necessary. Now he froze into position, so when Scylla arrived and examined the area at 3, Chen was already a part of the background. There was nothing to reveal him. He was there before Scylla came; he would be gone once Scylla died.
He held his nunchaku loosely, a stick in each hand, letting the rough wire curve as it wanted. When it was 3:41, he stood, and his hands felt strong. They were his glories, those hands; he had worked all his life on them, for the rest of his body was frail. He had never weighed much over a hundred pounds.
Chen began moving forward.
“Was not Scylla a female monster?”
“Scylla was a rock. A rock near a whirlpool. Charybdis was the whirlpool.”
“And are you that? A rock?”
Silence from Scylla.
Chen began closing.
“I am instructed to say that your price is too high.”
Damn her! Chen thought, she jumped to that, she was supposed to have gotten there more slowly—of all the times for him to have to get stuck with a novice! Scylla would be on to it now. Chen wanted to quicken his pace, but when you were silent, speed was your enemy. You had to be steady, you had to be slow. Otherwise there was the risk of fabric brushing fabric, twigs snapping, thunderous sounds.
“Are you also instructed to negotiate?”
Chen was six feet behind the big man. He would have preferred to have been four, but the damn girl had ruined that.
“Of course.”
Three feet behind Scylla now.
“Well then, for Chrissakes, negotiate, make a counter offer, that’s what negotiating is.”
“Of course,” she said, and as Chen moved the wire around Scylla’s throat he was already aware that Scylla had gotten his hand up. His right hand was keeping the wire from the throat. Bitch, Chen thought, but then he banished everything from his mind but business. He had pulled his wire through flesh before, and hand bones broke easily.
He put his body into perfect balance and began the kill ...
As the blood almost leaped free of his wounded right palm, Scylla was aware that the girl in the bench across had a pistol in her hand, which was stupid, guns were stupid in the darkness, just noisemakers, any hit was a lucky hit, but even though she was wrong to have brought the thing into play, she could have taken him with it if she had moved quickly enough, because right then he was dominated by pain, and pain changed the world. Pain put a cloud around you, you couldn’t see through it, couldn’t act in accordance with logic and experience and training.
So, for an instant, as the wire cut deeper into his hand, Scylla was feeble and clouded and ripe for dying.
But she was slow, too slow, the moment went by.
His brain began to clear. He was Scylla the rock. Remember that! You are Scylla the rock and you must do something, now. He hit the words hard in his mind, because the girl was standing up with the pistol, and so what if his mind was clearing, a bullet could crush clear tissue as well as clouded, and it was Chen behind him, an equal, one of the few if not the only because you are Scylla the rock and you must do something!
Something extraordinary, remarkable, unique, that’s all, and you have five seconds. Go.
Chen was great but Chen was small—the girl was approaching—Chen was quick but Chen was now stationary—the girl raised the pistol into firing position—so if you could budge Chen, if you could unsettle his balance, if you could manage that ...
Scylla knew what he had to try then.
He had seen it done. Once. On a basketball court. The nonpareil Monroe matched against the genius Frazier. The ultimate in offense against the greatest defender. No one near them. Mano a mano. Monroe moved to the basket and faked right, and if you fake right, there are only two further mov
es remaining to you: You can fake right and go left, or you can fake right, then fake left, and go right.
Monroe did neither.
He faked right and went right, around Frazier, who could only stand there, watching the score.
Scylla faked right and went right.
He forced his body in that direction along the bench, and then, when he seemed as if about to slow, about to fake back left, he powered everything he had into the completion of the right move, and behind him he could sense the wire momentarily loosen as Chen’s balance deserted him.
Now, with all the power in his great body, Scylla hunched forward, pulling the tiny man unwillingly with him, and when he was in balance off the bench, Scylla put all his strength into a shoulder throw, sailing Chen helplessly over him, aiming him toward the too-slow girl.
They went down hard, and the girl was stunned, the pistol skittering along the sidewalk, and Scylla saw it but so did Chen, and Chen went for it, scrabbling along the cement like a desperate roach.
Scylla let him.
His right hand was pouring blood and next to useless, and he watched as Chen got close, and then he kicked Chen’s head off. Or tried to. But Chen was ready and took Scylla’s foot and snapped it around, tripping Scylla down, and Scylla came back with a blow from his left hand, but it only grazed Chen’s head because even on his knees, even still dazed from the shoulder throw, Chen could move, and Scylla went for another left-hand blow, and again Chen spun free, and another left-hand hit missed as Chen spun and twisted, and he really was like a roach, a waterbug that you could see and chase but somehow never quite reach, and they both went for the gun then, but it was clumsy going, and when Scylla saw he might not get it first he kicked at it and sent it spinning into silent grassy darkness as Chen chopped him at the neck, and Scylla moved enough so Chen missed a death spot, but that didn’t mean it didn’t hurt, didn’t make his nerves shriek, didn’t start his brain again to clouding, but that must not happen Scylla thought, if I cloud I’m gone, and again he missed with the left, and his right was useless, to use the right would be simply too painful, he knew that and Chen knew that, so when Scylla went for a death spot with his right, when he connected, there was a double cry of pain, and who was to say which was the greater agony, his or Chen’s. All you could be sure of was that Chen’s was over sooner. Gasping, Scylla stood, moved past the dead Oriental, finished the girl in silence, then started running down the path toward the Albert Memorial, wrapping a handkerchief around his right hand as he moved.
The Novels of William Goldman Page 98