Frederick Pohl

by The Cool War

  He looked up. Something was happening. The prospective buyers who had seated themselves were leaving the benches and coming down into the pit, and in a moment he saw why. Attendants in the smoking jackets of waiters were leading in a procession of persons wearing thin cloaks and i minimi. They were the subjects of the auction. And the fifth to enter was Leota.

  The costume that had seemed a little extreme, but highly attractive, in the Blue Grotto struck Hake as appallingly scanty here. Even covered by the clinging, but nearly transparent, cloak. Hake did not like the way the other customers looked at her—they were not all studying her, to be sure, but even the fact that the other fourteen items of merchandise drew attention, some of them a good deal more than Leota, seemed to him demeaning. He pushed his way past a cocktail waitress and a slight, dark man in a kepi and a tailored shorts-suit to reach her. Her eyes widened.

  “Hake! Get the hell out of here!”

  He shook his head, “I’m going to get you out. I’ll pay your bill—”

  “Piss off!” she hissed, staring around. On the covered drum nearest hers one of the attendants was demonstrating the muscles of a teenaged peasant boy with macho gill-wattles carved into his neck. Only the Arab in shorts was watching them. And he was smiling. The fact that Leota had a friend present made her more interesting, Hake realized angrily. She leaned close and whispered, “You can’t afford this. And I’ll be all right. If you want to do something to help, remember what we were talking about on the ship.”

  “I remember. But I’m going to buy you free, Leota. I’ve got the, ah, the price.”

  “Idiot! You use phony credit and you’ll find yourself up here too! Horny, you can be so stupid. If I go out of here with you, how long do you think it’ll be before your buddies come after me?”

  While he was trying to think of an answer to that, she added: “It’s only going to be thirty days or so. They bid on per-diem contracts, and I ought to be good for sixty or seventy hundred thousand lire a day.” She glanced at the Saudi, who was strolling closer, studying the shape of her body under the cape. “Now get lost! I—I appreciate the thought, Horny, but I don’t need your help. I’ll be a lot safer if some pasta manufacturer takes me home for a while, until things cool off.”

  “Excuse me,” said the Saudi politely, moving past Hake to peer into Leota’s face.

  Hake felt himself trembling. The notion of Leota being sold into—into what was, after all, prostitution! like some Minneapolis teenager shagged into the stable of a Times Square pimp!—stung him in nerves he had not known he possessed. He was conscious of an unusual squirming in his groin. It was not figurative, but a physical fact, as if his testicles were responding to the threat to his manhood by trying to creep up out of sight. And at the same time he was conscious of a strong desire to punch the Arab out.

  And all this was as astonishing to Hake as it was unpleasant, because he had never known himself as a beau-gallant. I’m a God-damned anachronism, one part of his mind was telling another, I belong in the court of Aqui-taine! And quite separately, another piece of his mind—or perhaps a piece of Horny Hake that lived nowhere near his mind—tensed the muscles and worked the tendons and moved the joints that stiff-armed the Saudi, grabbed Leota by the arm and dragged her across the clearing floor, toward the exit— The exit where one of the attendants was picking up a phone, while three others moved menacingly toward him. One caught at each of Hake’s arms. The third shook a fist, hissing furiously in Italian. From behind, something struck Hake’s shoulder; he craned his neck, and saw that it was the Saudi, thin lips pouting under the raptor nose, ivory swagger stick raised to hit him again. One of the attendants moved diplomatically between them. The Arab drew back, suspending the attack in preference to being touched, and declared in particulate Oxonian English, “This common creature—has had the impudence— to ruffianize me.”

  “I didn’t!” The attendant twisted his arm, but Hake blazed, “He’s lying! At most, I brushed him aside!”

  “I suggest—” shrilled the Arab—“that we permit the authorities to deal with this gangster!” And it was only then that Hake saw that a pair of carabinieri had appeared behind the attendants. One of them, whom Hake had somehow seen before, was speaking sorrowfully and judg-mentally in Italian, while the attendants nodded.

  “He says,” translated the other policeman, “that you have already confessed yourself to be a sexual pervert—do you deny it? for shame!—a voyeur! And you trespass here, offending our guest, Sheik Hassabou.”

  Hake’s diminishing rational self possessed enough jurisdiction still to cause him to say, quite reasonably, “I see i there may be some sort of misunderstanding here.” But at the same time the non-rational one was swelling against thinning control. The Arab thoughtfully lifted his swagger stick again. Analytically, Hake might have perceived that it was unlikely he meant to strike. Why should he? Right was on his side, along with the majesty of the law. Analytical Hake was not involved. Glandular Hake and machismatic Hake and the ensorceled Aquitainian Hake outnumbered and overwhelmed the analytical one. He flung the policeman’s arms away. Alarmed, the Saudi struck at him with the baton while his other hand went instinctively to the hilt of the ceremonial dagger at his belt.

  And, of course, beyond question the Arab would not use it to kill. And when Hake instinctively grabbed for the dagger and it came away into his astonished hand, he would not have used it to kill either. But reflexive Hake did not know the first, nor reflexive Arab, police and attendants the second; and all at once he was the very picture of mad pervert at bay with naked blade in his hand. “Oh, Horny!” wailed Leota’s voice, “you should have listened—” And they all moved in at once, and clubbed him to the ground.

  IX

  When i was a ballsy boy like you,” said Yosper, swirling the whiskey around his glass as they waited for Hake’s plane, “I was as shit-stupid as you are, or, no, not that stupid, but stupid enough. I could’ve aced myself over any dumb, dirty pretty-puss that lifted a leg on my fireplug, same’s you. ‘Course, I didn’t. Even then, I had some smarts. But I could have, yes.” And it was as if they were playing the same scenes all over again. The sets were a little different; they were in the sky lounge at the Rome airport instead of a Vomero restaurant or Capri night club or the Munich pension. But the actors were the same, and playing the same parts. Only the one supporting actor who was Hake himself was made up in a different way: he had a compression bandage over his left ear to protect the new stitches that held it on. The rest—the black eyes, bruised jaws, the stiff and uneasy way he moved—they were the equivalent of the lettering on an easeled poster, Some Time Later, which he himself did enact. But the play was all reprise, Yosper’s monologue attended by the chorus, brave Mario, sweet Dieter, even laughing Carlos, who had just flown in from heaven knew where, to join Yosper for heaven knew what. “—of course, there are some brutes that I personally would not touch with a borrowed, ah, thing. Not now. Not even when I was a great deal younger than you, Hake, and almost as dumb. Were you balling her?”

  Hake glared at him through swollen eyes. The old man waved a hand. “I guess you were, and you got your cojones misplaced to where your brains belong. Foul, foolish business, Hake, but it’s happened to better men than you, and I won’t hold it against you. Looks like you’re home free. Not counting a few aches and pains, of course. The cops dropped charges, fair enough; figured they got their jollies kicking you around on the way to the questura. So there’s nothing on the record, and won’t be unless you pissed the sheik off worse’n I think you did. But that I doubt, because he’s gone. So—no report, no problem. The boys and I won’t say anything. And, man! You’re some mean hand at a bar-room brawl, Hake, you know that? Seven against one, and you wade right in! Wouldn’t’ve thought it of you.”

  “Stop now,” Hake said clearly.

  Yosper was brought down, disconcerted, in full flow. “What?”

  “I said stop for a minute. Please,” he added, pro forma. “I want to kn
ow what happened to Leota.”

  “Why, she’s gone, Hake. The Sheik of Araby took off for his desert tent off in the Sahel or someplace, and naturally he took her along to give him what he wants. You know,” he said scientifically, “from what I hear, those sheiks want some freaky fixin’s when they go to it. Too bad you can’t ask her about it sometime, Hake. Be interesting to learn something, you know?”

  “Yosper, God damn you—”

  Around the table the three young men shifted position slightly, without either menace or anger, simply -entering the “ready” mode. Yosper raised his hand. “Hake here isn’t going to do anything, are you, Hake? No. You shouldn’t take the name of the Lord in vain. But He’s got as much sense as I have, and He knows you’re just pissed off.” He paused for a second, looking at Hake with sharp blue eyes that, for a wonder, had something in them Hake could only recognize as compassion. “Get over it, boy,” he said.

  “You’ll never see her again. Listen. Likely as not she’ll come out of it smelling of roses. Old Sheik Hassabou gives his ladies emeralds and rubies—maybe a few little scars too, of course. Don’t get sore, boy.”

  Hake said bitterly, “Of course I won’t get sore! Why should I? All you’ve done is get a girl’s life wrecked, and involve me in dope selling, and—”

  “Shu, shu, boy. There’s important reasons for all this.”

  “I can’t wait to hear what the important reason for addicting kids to dope is,” Hake snarled.

  “Hake,” Yosper said kindly, “dope’s not that bad. I been there. You ever hear of Haight-Ashbury?”

  Hake shrugged. “Some place in California? A long time ago?”

  “I was there,” Yosper said proudly. “It was all love and sharing, and dope, and nobody got hurt. Much. ‘Course, it didn’t last. The rich ones went to Napoma. The rest of us tried the East Village, and the caves on Crete, and Khatmandu. I did every bit of it, boy, and I thank my Lord Savior I don’t have to do it again.” He stared into space, his lips working as though he were tasting something he liked. “Good dope in Nepal,” he said at last, “but it’s against God’s commandments. Now they’re all off around the Persian Gulf, old bastards like me that haven’t learned their lesson and kids that don’t know the score yet.”

  Carlos grumbled, “Yosper, why do you waste your time with him?”

  “It’s no waste,” Yosper said earnestly. “The boy’s got good stuff. He justa has a few wrong ideas, like about dope. Why, look at it the righta way, we’re doing those wop kids a favor.”

  “Us too,” Dieter grinned. “We make even more from PCP than we made from selling Ku Klux Klan nightshirts in Germany.”

  “But the kids get the most out of it,” Yosper insisted. “Dope separates the men from the boys, and it teaches you a lot about just plain living. Why,” he said earnestly, “wasn’t for my time in the Haight and Khatmandu I wouldn’t be half this honest and open and compassionate.”

  X

  Hake flew back to the United States in far grander style than he had left it. Not merely was he in th£ first-class section of the Trans-Pam jumbo, marinated in wines, cosseted with cushions, but the seat beside him was paid for and empty. The stewardesses made it up into a little bed for him. The Team rewarded its members.

  But Hake’s question was how he could best reward the Team. He began to think of it while the jet was lunging up into the yellow-gray Tyrrhenian sky and the oily beach at Ostia was dropping away beneath. He did not sleep, even though one of the stews brought him hot milk and another sat beside him, to stroke the poor bandaged head of the man who had been so brutally attacked by ragazzi- He wished they would leave him alone. He was busy scheming.

  At Kennedy the chief flight attendant hurried out the gate to speak to the customs agents and a stewardess found him a wheelchair. He went straight to the head of the line, and when he got through Immigration a Trans-Pam courier was waiting to conduct Reverend Hake to his waiting limousine. Hake was aware of what was happening. Part of it was only that Yosper had whispered a word in the purser’s ear, to say that this poor man’s very life was at risk because of a mugging in the shadow of the Colosseum itself. But part of it was more. The invisible embrace of the Team never let him go.

  One of Yosper’s boys had even phoned ahead. It was ten at night before the limo reached Long Branch, but Jessie was warned and waiting. She peered into his ruined face. “Oh, Horny! They said yg,u might need a wheelchair, but I thought we could just use your old chairlift. Then you can lean on my arm—”

  “I can walk, Jessie.” He waved the driver away—let the Team tip him, if a tip was what he was waiting for.

  She clucked despairingly. “You look really terrible, Horny.”

  “I appreciate your telling me that, Jessie.” He proved his ability to walk by limping heavily past her into the house. All of the cuts and stabbing pains had turned into sullen sore aches and stiffnesses, and walking was no fun. He didn’t want to discuss it. Knowing she had followed him into his room he dropped his bag and said over his shoulder, “And for the next few days I don’t want to see anyone but you.”

  “Well, I don’t blame you there, Horny.”

  “Except,” he said, “first thing tomorrow I want you to get an IBM representative in to see me, and a car dealer. And, oh, yes, while I think of it, a carpet salesman. And day after get me on an early flight to Washington.”

  “You mean the Metroliner, right?”

  “I mean a flight. On an airplane, and now I’m going to take a hot bath and go to bed. Good night, Jessie.”

  As soon as she was out of the house, clucking and fussing, coming back twice to tell him that she had left him a pot of chicken soup on the stove and that she wasn’t really sure she could get all those people in but would do her best, Hake spilled his battered bag onto the bed. He dumped the filthy clothes, some of them still from the unwashed weeks Under the Wire, into a hamper and hesitated over the rest. Lock-pick, garroting wire, circuit testers. Telecommunications codes and Blue Box pitchpipe. At the bottom were the tapes and fiches The Incredible Art had given him so long ago, and for them he could see no immediate use. For the other things—yes, no doubt. He was not yet sure what the use would be but he would find one. He stripped off his clothes and limped to the full-length mirror in the bathroom door.

  He was, in fact, a mess. The old network of scars on the left side of his chest, where his ribs had been spread and respread with tools like car jacks, were almost lost under the greater, newer marks. He had green-gray bruises all over his body. Both eyes were black. Under the adhesive dressing, the squashed sides of his nose were purply red, and the bandage over his ear was stained with blood. He studied himself appraisingly and nodded. Nobody trained Under the Wire could have done a more thorough job.

  Remained to see what he was going to do about it.

  He ran hot water prodigally into the tub and, while he was waiting for it to fill, experimentally flushed his toilet. It did not speak to him, not even a “hello.” Apparently he had been given the evening off.

  Hake lowered himself into the steaming tub, so sore and so troubled that he was almost at peace. Inside his head was a solid and well-defined lump of cold anger. It was not mere helpless rage and frustration, not any more. It had been transmuted, and the transmutation occurred as Yosper and his boys were walking him through the perfunctory Roman passport control. They ambled in military formation, Yosper on his right side, Dieter on his left; Carlos followed a few paces behind and Mario took the point; it was exactly as if they were patrolling some not quite secure area, and as Yosper waved genially to the boarding clerk and led Hake past her into the waiting plane, he stopped and said, with real emotion, “You’re a good man, Hake.” He patted Hake’s shoulder awkwardly, and then amended himself. “Too shitfired headstrong, sure. Get you in trouble one of these days, boy, real trouble, mark my words. But you got a lot of Moxie. I want you to know I’m sending a commendation in for your promotion file. And next time I have a job you can he
lp in, I’m going to ask for you by name.”

  “Thank you,” said Hake, and at that moment he made his resolution.

  In his own bathtub, staring up at the green mermaids on the plastic shower curtain, he was calculating ways and means.

  They would forgive you anything, he thought. Just so you got the job done. More so if you showed balls enough to run a game of your own now and then. Leota had been quite right; they were grooming him for a big one, and evidently they considered he was coming along just fine.

  Very well. He would accept their trust. He would play their mad macho games, and do his best to earn more trust. It was a good thing to be trusted, because without the possession of trust you did not have the power to betray.

  This time the receptionist at the Lo-Wate Bottling Co. was a slim middle-aged Oriental male instead of his first visit’s guardian of the gate, but he gave Hake the identical loathsome stare. “Do you have an appointment?” he asked, as if it were a foregone conclusion that Hake did not.

  “I am the Reverend H. Hornswell Hake, to see Curmudgeon at once, and I don’t need one. Tell him I’m here.”

  Hake sat down and opened a magazine without waiting for an answer. He had no doubt that he would get past the receptionist. If his name or the lumps on his face were not passport enough, his arrogance would be. Hake was far from sure that arrogance would melt all difficulties in dealing with the Team. But it was the best tool he had in his chest to use at that moment. And, besides, it gave him pleasure.

  When he finally was led to the remembered office Curmudgeon’s scowl was black. “You jerked me out of a planning meeting!” he barked. “Man, you got a lot to learn. Never come here without orders, do you understand?”