Skillful Death

by Ike Hamill

  Every few hours, Pemba brought more tea and wouldn’t relent until Dom drank at least a few sips.

  Dom’s dreams were haunted by visions of Diki in great danger.

  He woke again in the night and he stayed silent on his cot, staring up at the ceiling of the cabin. He listened to Pemba’s even breathing, and waited for his head to clear. By the time the sun came up, Dom remembered the big man who ran away at the sight of Dom’s bloody daughter. He remembered the panic and then horrific glee on the old man’s face before he plunged the knife into Diki’s chest. He remembered how the candlelight had lied and animated Diki’s face even after she had surely grown still.

  With all the memories came realization. Dom flexed his arms and legs, but didn’t move from the bed until he was sure that he had control of his body. He turned only his head and saw Pemba’s slumbering body. His friend’s face was fully relaxed and free of the tortured guilt that Dom felt.

  Dom stepped across the rolling cabin and sat on Pemba’s chest. Pemba gasped as he woke. Dom pinned Pemba’s arms down.

  “What are you doing?” Pemba asked.

  “You drugged me.”

  “Yes. I had to. You weren’t being reasonable.”

  “It wasn’t your choice to make,” Dom said.

  “I have to look out for your best interests when you refuse to.” Pemba said. He thrashed his legs, but couldn’t shake Dom.

  “Tell the captain to take me back to the city.”

  “Tell him yourself. It won’t do any good now. Hakki fled. He’s probably half a world away by now. He’ll live the rest of his life with the guilt of what Varol did. Dom, we have Diki aboard. We need to take her back to the village so you can see her off.”

  “I can’t go back,” Dom said. “My poor daughter.”

  “There’s nothing more to do, my friend,” Pemba said.

  Dom slumped to the side and Pemba wriggled from beneath him. He sat on the cot and put his arm around Dom.

  ♣ ♢ ♡ ♠

  They held a small ceremony with just three attending—Dom, Pemba, and Tara’s aunt. Diki’s body was positioned on her side, curled up like a baby, and set atop the pyre. Dom felt the anger burning in Tara’s aunt more than the heat from the fire. Pemba looked at the ground rather than watch Diki be consumed by the flames. Dom remembered the stinging words from Tara’s aunt when Tara died. This time, she said nothing.

  ♣ ♢ ♡ ♠

  Dom stood when Pemba entered the office, and he remained standing until Pemba took a seat at his desk.

  “Do you know what’s missing from your office?” Dom asked.

  “What’s that?” Pemba asked. He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a small book. He wrote a few lines while Dom stood. Pemba put the book back in his drawer and looked up to find Dom still waiting for his attention.

  “What is missing?” Pemba asked.

  “You have no mementos from your family in here. No portraits, no drawings from your children, no flowers from your wife.”

  Pemba smiled and leaned back in his chair.

  “What are you saying, Dom?”

  “Your man, at the door, what is he, your guard?”

  “Security, I suppose. I think you know his father. You used to work in the mines with…” Pemba said.

  Dom cut him off. “Why do you need security?”

  “We’ve both seen some terrible things in our lives. They go back to … when? When you had your factory burned? Things were quiet for a long while, but we both know the world lost its innocence quite a while ago.”

  “Yes, it did,” Dom said. “He said you ordered that nobody should come in.”

  “I did.”

  “Including me?”

  “Clearly not,” Pemba said. “You’re here, aren’t you?”

  “Only because I talked my way in. I reminded him that you and I have a friendship that goes back to childhood, and that I have always been welcome in your house. If he had stuck to the letter of his orders, I wouldn’t have been allowed access to you. Why is that?”

  “Forgive me. I gave a blanket order that was misunderstood. I’ll try to be more clear in the future. Trust no one, lest I be murdered in my own house. Oh, except Dom. Always let Dom in. It just takes the simplicity off the rule, don’t you think?”

  Dom sat down on a low couch near a window.

  “Pemba, my oldest friend, what really happened to Diki?”

  “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “Those men, who I supposedly cheated in another life, how did they find Diki that night?”

  “I don’t know,” Pemba said. “How did they find us? They pulled me from a carriage and knocked me unconscious. I still have the scar. I booked that carriage with a huge tip and didn’t give a name. I have no idea how those men found you, me, Diki, or anyone.”

  “I believe they had help,” Dom said.

  Pemba shook his head.

  “They had help from someone who stands to gain from my disappearance,” Dom said.

  “Dom. Please.”

  “Tashi investigated your bookkeeping. We know of your debt.”

  “Do you? Do you understand this business you invented? Do you know how far I have to go into debt each year? Do you also know how much profit I earn on that investment with every conference we host? That’s how it works, Dom. I spend money on clients, advertising, travel, meals, bribes, and everything else. Then, when we have our conferences, we make back all that and more. My margin is higher than anyone’s. You and Tashi should know all this.”

  “You’ve never been in debt like you are now. Our other businesses have cash reserves.”

  “And our other businesses are not expanding at the rate I am. Do you want to stay small, and have the slightest bump knock us off our feet? I don’t. I want to grow this business large enough to withstand fluctuations. I want it to survive. You asked me about family? This is my family.”

  “Fortune can’t replace people,” Dom said.

  “Neither can poverty. You’ve been paying penance for Tara’s death for fifteen years. Did all those years of living like a pauper replace her? And what exactly are you accusing me of?” Pemba straightened a pile of papers and polished a smudge on the surface of his desk. He didn’t look at Dom as he continued. “People don’t talk like this. People don’t come in and make grand accusations which erupt into big arguments. People harbor their suspicions and then eventually just stop talking to each other.”

  Dom walked out of Pemba’s office.

  52 ARRIVAL

  WITH TASHI’S HELP, DOM executed an elaborate plan. He set up three new identities—two in China, and one in California. With the first, he found his way into China. There he located an American expatriate, from whom he learned English. During his stay in China, Dom switched identities again. From there, he booked passage to the United States with a work visa. After landing in San Francisco, Dom adopted his final identity. He became the orphan of Russian émigrés who had fled the Bolshevik Revolution and managed to land on U.S. soil before welcoming their first and only child.

  On the last of his money, he traveled north to Washington. There he found a community of legitimate Russian descendants with a social convention of staying quiet about their ancestry. Dom became Bud, and Bud blended well.

  He took a small room at a boarding house which catered to itinerant fisherman. Men made quick, disposable friends between voyages, and Bud found them loose with their handshakes and eager to buy a stranger a drink. He watched them come and go and never felt probed to reveal too much about his past.

  Bud faked up a résumé to get a job with Evergreen Ore, a small silver processor on the Stillaguamish River. He proved solid on the concepts, but loose on the terminology, and landed a low-level job running the sorter. His driver’s license put him at fifty-one, but he could have easily passed for forty.

  Bud grew bored quickly. The plant had some interesting jobs, but they required an advanced degree or decades of experience, neither of which Bud c
ould show. He spent his free time learning about electronics. Building circuits gave purpose to his nimble fingers and sparked his curiosity. Books and manuals proved useless learning tools, but if he could get his hands on something, he could determine how it worked.

  Bud began picking up broken radios, televisions, calculators, and anything else with a circuit. Most of the time, he fixed the problem and sold the device to a second-hand store. Occasionally, he improved on the design and kept the appliance for himself. As the world adopted more and more electronic devices, Bud’s hobby absorbed all his free time. His friends and neighbors presented a wonderful variety of broken devices with electronic puzzles to solve. And, if he couldn’t find anything to fix, Bud came up with his own inventions.

  He moved to a small one-bedroom apartment in a divided up old house. He slept on the couch and turned the room into his workshop. The walls were lined with stacks of equipment, and his desk became his tool chest.

  Most of the time, helping someone he knew was enough. Most of the time, his satisfaction came from repairing something and restoring it back to working order. But one day, he experienced an epiphany that he couldn’t keep to himself.

  That afternoon, he did something unthinkable: Bud went to a store and purchased a new radio. He had a half-dozen radios in his shop, all in working order. He purchased this brand new radio just so he could take it apart.

  The idea was so simple, such a natural simplification to the circuit in front of him, that he couldn’t believe it would work. He could remove a dozen components and trim a third of the circuit board inside the radio and repurpose the remaining parts to work even better than they had before. The reduction would ease manufacturing, trim costs, and save space. Bud made the change and put his radio back together. It worked.

  He wrote a letter to the manufacturer, a medium-sized California company, and boxed up his prototype. Now that he’d proven the concept, he didn’t care about the radio. His satisfaction came from the successful execution of his idea. He sent the letter and the prototype back to the manufacturer and forgot about it.

  Bud quit his job at the plant and took a part-time job at a repair shop. The owner preferred to work on lamps and sewing machines, so he farmed out all the electronics work to Bud and allowed him to use the shop space to work on his own projects. Bud supplemented his income by refurbishing and re-selling, and most months he managed to make even more than he had at the plant. He didn’t have an opportunity to employ his new radio design very often. Most of the radios that came into the shop were bulky old tube-based gear. People didn’t bother to bring in smaller mass-produced stuff.

  ♣ ♢ ♡ ♠

  Bud mostly worked in the back room, where he could spread out. The appliances he worked on usually contained dozens of parts and required Bud to keep careful track of each. The tuner in pieces before him was exhibiting multiple symptoms. The volume knob made a scratchy sound when turned, and the light behind the frequency indicator was flickering. These problems were mind-numbingly boring, and getting the thing apart enough to fix them was nearly impossible. Bud was ready for a distraction. He wandered to the counter when he heard the bell ring.

  The owner of the shop was organizing clocks on a shelf.

  “May I help you?” the owner asked.

  Edgar, one of Bud’s regulars, held up a small black appliance.

  The owner lifted his half-glasses up to his forehead, saw the small electronic device, and simply pointed towards Bud.

  “Hello, Mr. Edgar,” Bud said.

  “Hi,” Edgar said. He crossed to the counter and set down his device. It was a portable audio cassette recorder.

  “What is that for?” Bud asked. The little plastic device with its earpiece jack and three-inch speaker was something a kid would carry around. Edgar was a serious audiophile. With an amazing turntable and amplifier at his house, why would Edgar want the cheap cassette player?

  “I don’t think I’m getting good signal out,” Edgar said. “I can’t read anything from this.”

  “Pardon?”

  “My computer?”

  “Pardon?” Bud asked. He’d only been speaking English for a few years. He worked hard on his accent, but he still ran across new words.

  Edgar nodded, perhaps realizing he needed to explain from the beginning. “I have this thing called a computer. It’s a machine that you type on and things come up on the TV. It’s like a… It’s hard to explain,” he said, smiling. “Anyway, it stores programs on these cassettes.” Edgar pulled up on a tab, ejecting a plastic audio cassette. Bud knew those. They were small and convenient, but the sound was terrible.

  “What kind of program?” Bud asked.

  “It’s like a set of instructions for the computer to follow.”

  Bud took the device from Edgar and began turning it over in his hands.

  “So a voice comes from here and tells this other thing what to do?” Bud asked. He pointed at the speaker.

  “No. I plug in a cable here, and it attaches to the computer. You hit play on here and you type LOAD on the computer and it loads in the program. Then I can run it on the computer. This one is a chess game.”

  Edgar’s words made sense individually, but together they represented gibberish to Bud. He couldn’t puzzle any meaning from them. Bud decided to start from basics.

  “Come with me,” he said. He lifted the gate in the counter and waved Edgar to the back.

  Bud took the cassette recorder over to his diagnostics bench and grabbed a jack to fit the output.

  “This won’t mess up my game, will it? I can’t make a copy of that one. It has some kind of dual loader built into it.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but no, I won’t change the cassette.”

  The battery compartment was empty, so Bud hooked up the device to a power supply from his bench. He connected the output to an amplifier and played the cassette. The tape began with a clean stable tone, and then it made a high-pitched mechanical hissing sound. From that sound, Bud understood both the purpose of the cassette and the reason it didn’t work. In that sound, before he’d even seen a computer, Bud understood his future.

  “The sounds on this tape, they tell the other thing what to do?” Bud asked, but he already knew the answer.

  “Yes, the computer,” Edgar said. He mirrored Bud’s enthusiasm.

  “And the computer, it performs the instructions, one at a time?”

  “Yes.”

  “What kinds of things can it do with these instructions?” he asked. He imagined a mechanical arm building a bicycle. He imagined an electronic control system adjusting a furnace for an office building. He imagined a timing system for city traffic signals ensuring the steady flow of cars at rush hour.

  “This is a chess game. You play chess on your TV,” Edgar said.

  “Oh,” Bud said, disappointed.

  “Can you figure out what’s wrong with it?”

  “Yes,” Bud said. He rewound the tape to the beginning and played it again. For his demonstration, he turned off the amplifier and hooked the output of the player to an oscilloscope. “This tone at the beginning…do you remember how it warbled?”

  “Yes?”

  “That tone is a control tone that the machine uses to lock in. Do you see this wave?” Bud asked, pointing at the oscilloscope’s display. A blue-green wave locked briefly on the screen and then it began jumping left and right. “This is a seven-hundred-and-seventy hertz wave. Once the machine locks with this signal, the instructions will follow. You would begin with a constant-frequency tone. Since your tone warbled, I believe there is something disturbing the speed of the capstan, or the tape is slipping. We will start with cleaning the capstan.”

  Bud executed the cleaning quickly, using isopropyl alcohol and a special swab. When he finished, he played the cassette again. This time the wave on the scope was solid.

  “I think that was the problem. Shall we try it?” Bud asked.

  “Oh,” Edgar said. “I won’t
know if it works until I hook it back up to my computer. I get an error if it doesn’t load.”

  “Let’s go,” Bud said.

  “You mean to my house? Oh. Okay, sure. You want to follow me over there?”

  “You can drive,” Bud said. “I don’t have a car.”

  ♣ ♢ ♡ ♠

  Edgar hooked up the cassette deck to the computer while Bud looked around the office. The rest of the basement was finished well, but it still had a slightly musty basement smell. Edgar’s office was an oasis. With its own dehumidifier, it felt dry and warm. The bookshelves were packed, but orderly. The oak desk sat beneath the room’s one window. High on the wall, the window offered light, but no view. Edgar rolled in a chair from another room and Bud took a seat.

  A small television sat atop the computer’s case. Edgar hit a button on the right side of the computer’s build-in keyboard and the machine emitted a round beep.

  Bud watched with fascination as the green letters appeared on the screen. When the cursor blinked at the bottom of the screen, Edgar typed in “LOAD” and started the cassette player. The screen displayed a message informing them that the game would load in fifty seconds.

  “Excellent, I think you fixed it,” Edgar said.

  “Very good,” Bud said.

  Edgar was several years younger than Bud. Both men looked like teenagers as they waited for the machine to load the game. When it appeared on the screen, Bud saw the image of a chessboard and he caught his breath. When he’d pictured the types of instructions a machine might follow, he’d seen mechanical and electrical possibilities. Before him, he saw images, moving and controlled by Edgar’s hands on the keyboard. His own hands itched to touch the shiny keys. The uses for such a machine were endless.

  Edgar began a chess game and explained how to move the pieces using the keyboard.