This afternoon I ran into one of the people I came over on the airplane with from Miami—a guy named Tex Draza. I guess you’d call him a cowboy only there aren’t hardly any cows left anymore even in Texas where he comes from. We stopped off and had a drink together in a saloon called Sloppy Joe’s. They claim that this is the original Sloppy Joe’s, though I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean. It was a nice friendly place down near the end of Main Street, and the walls were filled with photos of famous people who have been through there. Draza and I drank Zombies, a very ancient drink that dates back to the twentieth century. It’s a mixture of all kinds of rums and a few chemicals, too, and boy, it is potent.
I had been wondering about all the new construction that’s going on in town and the flags and banners and stuff they’re hanging all over. It seems that I’ve come here practically on the eve of Esmeralda’s biggest holiday. Saturnalia, they call it. Well, it seems that on this day, everybody dresses up in elaborate costumes and there is a great deal of sexual license, though Draza only hinted at this. I’d kinda like to see that.
During Saturnalia, Draza told me, there’s parties and parades and floats and sports events and dancing contests and all that, and there’s also this custom called Passing the Spot.
The Spot is a small brass cylinder with a red spot on its side. Inside it’s got a small but powerful little bomb, strong enough to kill anyone within a foot or so of it. This bomb is armed and ready to be set off by an internal timing device. But nobody knows exactly when the bomb will go off. Sometime during Saturnalia, that’s all they know.
But what they do, Allan, if you can believe this, they pass this Spot around from hand to hand, like Russian Roulette only with a bomb instead of a gun. A man or a woman shows how much guts they have by hanging on to the Spot for a while before handing it to someone else. Tourists don’t have to take the Spot, but many of them do anyhow. I guess they’re like the foreigners who used to run in the streets with the bulls in Pamplona, like Hemingway wrote about.
I saw Nora last night. She looked great. She lives in a picturesque section near the center of the city. I’m staying with her awhile until I can get my own place. The streets where she lives are narrow and winding, and vehicles are forbidden. The place looks so old, what with all the buildings being made of stone and set at funny angles to each other, that you forget it’s not old at all. Most of the city was built in the last seventy years.
I like it here. I like how this little city twists and turns and sprawls around. There’s always something interesting to look at. It’s a happy place, and that’s a weird thing to say about a place dedicated to death, but it’s true.
I’ve been checking out this Hunt situation and it looks pretty good. I’ll be getting into it soon, after I learn a little more about it. Tell Caleb and the others I’ll be sending them some money as soon as I can make some.
I’m writing this from a bar in the downtown area. It’s funny, I’ve just seen someone I know. He’s the guy who gave me a lift from the airport the other day. A Spotter. Mike Albani. I’ll continue this later.
18
Albani was sitting on a red plush barstool drinking a glass of white wine. He wore a neatly cut blue blazer, gray flannel slacks, and highly polished black loafers. He wore a blue silk ascot around his neck, tucked into his crisp white shirt. His dark handsome face broke into a dazzling smile when Harold came over.
“Harold! Delighted to see you! I hope you’ve been enjoying yourself on our little island.”
“It’s a real pretty place,” Harold said. “I’ve been having a fine time.”
“What do you think about our Hunt?”
“Seems like an interesting proposition, if you can just keep from getting killed.”
“A good Spotter helps you stay alive. Can I get you a drink?’”
“Thanks. I’ll take whatever you’re having.”
“Another white wine, Charlie,” Albani said to the white-jacketed bartender.
Harold perched on a barstool next to Albani. “You’re not out meeting the planes today?”
“No. What we’re getting now is the holiday rush before Saturnalia. Most of these people aren’t interested in the fine art of the Hunt. They just want to get drunk, get a woman, make a lot of noise, and afterward be able to tell people how wild they were in Huntworld. There’s no harm in it, of course, and I don’t look down upon them. But I do somewhat miss the old days.”
“What was it like in the old days?” Harold asked.
Albani smiled wistfully. He took a gold-tipped cigarette from a silver case, lit it, exhaled a plume of smoke, then offered the case to Harold. “Go on, try one. It’s basically a mixture of Virginia and Yenidje tobaccos treated with a mild mood elevator called Uptime 32. Nothing hallucinogenic, just a lift to the spirits.”
Harold accepted a cigarette, lit up, took a small inhalation, coughed it out, tried a smaller one, and found he could stand that. The smoke had an odd spicy-sweet flavor which he found unpleasant at first but then quickly got used to.
“You don’t have to hold in the smoke,” Albani said. “Don’t even bother inhaling. The active ingredients go into the bloodstream through the mucous membranes of the mouth. Quite harmless, nonaddicting, and perfectly legal, of course. But you were asking me about the good old days. As recently as twenty years ago, Hunting was almost a religious ritual. Every head of family would be sure to get in at least one Hunt a year. People used to hire whole families of Spotters back in those days, when money was a little easier to come by. These Spotters were your team, and they were much more than mere employees. They were like family, even though you did have to pay them. The custom was a little like that of noble families during the Renaissance, when every wealthy man had his flock of clients.”
“Sounds nice,” Harold said.
Albani nodded, a wistful expression in his lustrous brown eyes. “Back then a well-trained Spotter had more work than he could handle. Sometimes a Spotter would make enough from his clients to afford to go into Hunting himself.”
“Is it such an expensive practice?” Harold asked. “I thought you just needed a gun.”
“It’s not the Hunting itself that’s so expensive. It’s just that if you’re at all serious about it, you tend to do it to the exclusion of everything else. Most Hunters find it inconvenient to hold a full-time job. Having to work cuts down on your killing time, ties you to a routine which leaves you vulnerable to surprise attack and ambush. Bad idea, working. We don’t do much of it in Huntworld.”
“Then how do you live?”
“The government pays a yearly stipend to each registered Hunter based on the tax officer’s estimate of how much he might earn if he weren’t spending all his time Hunting. Negative income tax, it’s called. A very popular feature. And there’s also a bonus for each registered kill.”
“But how can the government afford all that? It must mean they’re supporting half of the population.”
“Oh, it’s all carefully calculated. Hunting is our biggest tourist draw and our main source of foreign revenue. By Hunting we keep the money coming in, and the government does its best to keep the Hunters and their Spotters in fighting funds. Unfortunately, it’s not enough, as I well know.”
“You?” Harold said. “You look like you’re doing OK.”
“One must keep up a front. But I’m actually just barely getting by. Most of my money has been lost in another of Huntworld’s practices, one even more addicting than murder. I refer to the king of the vices, gambling.”
“Couldn’t you stay away from it?” Harold asked.
“Not really. Our gambling laws are unique in the world. Not only is it legal to gamble here, at times it is obligatory.”
“The government makes you gamble?”
“Most of us need no encouragement. It’s all part of the risk-taking attitude that is at the heart of the Esmeraldan character.”
“What happens to the ones who lose?”
“If they
lose enough,” Albani said, “they go bankrupt.”
“And then?”
“For those who reach absolute bankruptcy—the bottom rung, completely tapped out, no money, nowhere they can borrow anymore—such people forfeit their remaining goods and become slaves of the government.”
“Slaves!” Harold said. “You can’t mean it! There’s no slavery in the modern world!”
“Isn’t there?” Albani said. He turned to the bartender. “Charles, tell Mr. Erdman about slavery.”
“Sure,” the bartender said cheerfully. He was a big, moon-faced man, paunchy and bald, wiping red hands on a soiled blue-and-white-check apron. “I can tell you about it from the inside.” He held out one hand. “See that ring? That’s a government slave ring.”
It was a plain black pinkie ring made of some shiny substance—ebony, perhaps—and set with a single small sparkling stone.
“It’ll be three years this spring that I became a government slave,” Charles said. “Five-card stud, that was my undoing. I’ve been leased out to the hotel here to help out during the tourist season. The rest of the time I’m a cargo inspector in the government custom service.”
Harold didn’t know what to say. It didn’t seem polite to ask a slave how he felt about slavery. But that was assuming that there was something shameful about slavery. Charles didn’t seem to feel that way. Nor did Mike Albani.
‘Slavery is necessary in a place like this,” Albani said. “Our citizens spend all their time having fun and looking for excitement. There just aren’t enough people around to do the serious work of keeping things going. It’s even difficult to find people to fill offices in local government. Most of the government work is done by slaves. Slavery is the only way to get people to take care of practical things like public sanitation and building maintenance.”
“Weird,” said Harold.
“Slavery is actually a pretty good system,” Charles said. “You can take all the risks and lead an exciting life without the fear of anything terribly bad happening to you aside from getting killed. The worst that’s going to happen is that you’ll run through your money and have to work for a living.”
“And even then,” Albani said, “it’s not forever. They start you out on the lowest level, of course— cleaning out the pig farms or working in the salt mines. But with a little luck you can move up to the administrative level. Government slaves in the administration are paid very well, as you might imagine, since they are the government and they vote their own salaries. It doesn’t take long for a government slave to be able to buy himself free.”
“It’s all very strange to me,” Harold said. “Not that some of it doesn’t seem to make some sense. What I find hard to understand is why people who don’t need the money risk their lives in this Hunt.”
“It does take a certain frame of mind,” Albani admitted. “Perhaps you have to live here awhile before you can feel its attractiveness. A lot of people feel that being a good Hunter is better than being a good anything else.”
“What does it take to be a good Hunter?”
“Cool nerves and luck. It has very little to do with expertise in weapons, or quick draws, or learning how to sneak around without being seen, or any of that pseudomilitary stuff. The essence of the Hunt is living your natural life in the midst of danger.”
“You must get a lot of real aggressive types here.”
Albani looked pained. “Not at all. The Hunt is more inclined to favor the subtleties of introversion.”
“I don’t know if you’ve convinced me,” Harold said. “But this has certainly given me a great deal to think about.”
The telephone at the end of the bar rang. The bartender went over to answer it. He spoke for a moment, then called Albani to the phone. Albani went to the phone, spoke briefly, and came back.
“I’d love to go on with our discussion,” Albani said. “But alas, duty calls.” He looked at his wrist- watch. “I’m due at an ambush in precisely twenty minutes. But I could give you a lift if you’re going that way.”
“Where is the ambush?” Harold asked. He was smoking another of Albani’s cigarettes and feeling light-headed and devil-may-care.
“Oh, it’s across town, over toward the Tulip Palace, on the Quatranango Heights, near the zoo. A very pretty section if you haven’t seen it already.”
“Let’s go,” Harold said.
19
The sun rode low in the west, wrapped in the purple clouds of evening. A pinkish glow touched the whitewashed buildings of Esmeralda. The palm fronds along Ocean Boulevard clattered in the rising evening breeze as Harold got into Albani’s white convertible.
When you’re driving down a palm-lined boulevard on a perfect golden afternoon it’s hard to be too worried about what you’re going to do when you reach your destination. The ride’s the thing, whether it’s to a wedding or a wake.
The stiff breeze blowing in from the sea had a savor of salt and iodine in it, and the faint rank smell of kelp piled up on the beaches. Albani drove with firm expertise, but without undue haste, west through the white-and-pink-stucco suburbs of Maldorado and Inchburg. He turned onto a secondary road just outside the city and they began climbing toward the heights of Lansir. There passed roadsigns for the zoo and the miniature rain forest. As they climbed the air became cool and the level plain of Esmeralda was suddenly revealed below them, dotted with farms and pastureland sloping down to the shining sea.
Albani pulled up at the entrance to the zoo. “I could drop you here,” Albani said. “It’s quite a good zoo, I believe. The only wildebeestes in the Caribbean. There’s a bus back to town.”
Harold said, “I do want to see the zoo, but I could go some other time. Would you mind if I came along? I’ve never been to an ambush.”
“Of course, delighted to have you,” Albani said.
Albani drove on for a ways, then turned onto a dirt road. The low-slung car banged badly against the high-crowned road. Albani came to a turnout, parked, turned off the engine, and set the emergency brake.
“We’ll have to do the next bit on foot,” he told Harold.
Albani led them up a narrow footpath and then into the woods. They worked their way through thick underbrush to a final screen of pines, and then they were on a crest overlooking the main road a hundred feet below. On the lip of the crest, directly in front of them, was a V-shaped wooden structure filled with large rocks. The upper part of it rested upon a platform beneath which cogwheel machinery was visible.
“With the turn of a crank,” Albani said, “I can drop that whole pile of rocks onto the road. Neat, eh? I had my helpers set it up months ago. People chase people along predictable routes. A good Spotter anticipates.’”
“What’s supposed to happen?” Harold asked.
“A car will be coming along this way shortly,” Albani said. “The Victim will be in it—a Mr. Draza from Texas.”
“Hey,” Harold said, “I met him coming over on the plane.”
“He visits Esmeralda every year,” Albani said. “This is his sixth successful Hunt, I believe. And his last. When his car reaches that milepost there, I will drop these rocks into the roadway in front of him, blocking his passage. Mr. Draza will get out. While he is trying to figure out where we are, his Hunter— Mr. Scott Jeffries, my employer—will drill him from a vantage point alongside the road.”
“Sounds a little complicated,” Harold said. “Isn’t there any simpler way to get the guy?”
Albani looked scornful. “Many other ways, no doubt. But ambushes of this sort are traditional. They also have the virtue of keeping Spotters employed. Now I’ll just make sure everything is all right.”
Albani drew a small radio out of his pocket and extended its long whip antenna. “Mr. Jeffries, are you in position?”
The radio crackled. A man’s thin high voice said, “Yes, I’m in position and ready. Is he coming?”
Albani scanned the road. “Yes, and right on time!”
From that height t
he approaching silver car was small indeed. Albani leaned forward, his hand on the trigger of the rock-dropping mechanism. Harold stood a few feet behind him, taking in the scene. A flash of light caught the corner of his eye. It had come from the wooded hillside behind and to his right. Harold turned. There was the flash again. And then he made out something—a shape—moving in the trees.
Harold didn’t know who it was or what it meant, but suddenly he was shocked into alertness, his pulses hammering. He shouted, “Get down!” and swept Albani off his feet. A split second later he heard the sharp flat crack of a high-powered rifle. A bullet slammed into the rock cradle where Albani had been standing.
Harold started to get up. Albani pulled him back down. There were four more shots, evenly spaced. From far away Harold could hear the sound of the car, a high thin buzz which grew louder, then fainter as it passed the failed ambush and went on.
“What do we do now?” Harold asked, lying flat on the ground.
“We wait. It’s obvious there’s a Spotter up there in the woods somewhere. He shouldn’t be shooting at us like that. It’s not the regular form, and certainly shows no professional courtesy to me.”
“Can’t you shoot back?”
“No gun. Spotters aren’t supposed to carry them. And even if I had one, I wouldn’t break the rules just because some untrained lout does so. Just stay down. Jeffries will be up here soon and the Spotter will go away.”
“Won’t he try to kill Jeffries?”
“Certainly not. Spotters are not permitted to kill Hunters.”
Within minutes Jeffries had scrambled up the hillside, his rifle at high port. He was a small, ivory- skinned man with plastered black hair, a small mustache, and a brown mole above his long upper lip. “Are you all right, Albani?” he asked.
“I’m Fine,” Albani said. “But obviously, I have been Spotted. And worse than that, anticipated. Me, Albani! Frankly, I’m mortified.”
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