“Be at ease,” said X. “I am looking for employment. You have, this week, received a contract for thirteen items or persons to be demolished and terminated. I know all about it. I believe you should sub-contract it to me. I am a hungry hunter and I will not let any prey escape me.”
(This was in Marseille in France. It was several days after X had left Babylonia Bagascia in Italy.)
“Who are you?” the Mogul asked.
“X.”
“So I half-suspected. But, X, you have the name of being a butterfly, long on talk, and short on blood.”
“I say that if a man sheds one more drop than is necessary, then he hasn't the fine edge for such work.”
“I, I'm a little partial to blood myself, X. And a little partial to all excesses. But I haven't any place for you. I have several showy tricksters in my organization already. They are amusing, but I am a grown man who doesn't need to be amused all the time. You do not have me here, X. I have you. Did you believe that I had only static guards? No, I also have fast-moving slammers. In fifteen minutes, one of them will come through that door, and I will give you to him to do as he will. You have meddled here, X. That costs you your life.”
“This will be close, Mogul. But I believe that I can bring it about that another man will come through that door before your slammer comes. And the first man who comes will be one of the thirteen men you wish. Choose the least likely, the least possible one. Pick any one of those thirteen men who are scattered so widely through the world. Name the one you want me to bring here, and I will cause him to walk through that door within ten minute's time. Which one do you want to see, Mogul?”
“Why, in these last few minutes of your life, are you fishing in that rain barrel, X? You do not know the names of any of the thirteen. It is only by some accident that you know there are thirteen men put under death contract. What good will it do to your butterfly ego to learn even one of the names? You're an odd little one, X, but I have plenty of odd ones now.”
“The thirteen men on whom you have kill-contracts are these,” X said:
“Joseph Cardinal Hedayat of Antioch.
“Terrance Cardinal of Cork
“Edward Cardinal Leviathan of Edinburgh
“Carlos Cardinal Artemis of Santa Cruz
“David Cardinal Lloyd-Spencer of Cardiff
“Henri Cardinal Salvatore of New Orleans
“Nicholas Cardinal Gregorio of Messina
“Xavier Cardinal Runosake of Kobe, Japan
“Kirol Cardinal Gabrailovitch of Zagreb
“Joseph Cardinal Doki of Douala
“Martino Cardinal Erculo of Milan. These are the thirteen, Mogul. Name me the one of them you wish and I will have him here within, ah, nine minutes now.”
“You are called on that, X. As if any of them would come to this door when the word is already out (it must be out if even a butterfly like you has heard it) that I have the contract! There are several of these that we haven't quite pin-pointed as to location yet, and several of them have gone into panic travel, but we watch them closely. But I do know where Xavier Runosake is. At the moment he is billeted with a group of Buddhists in his own Kobe. We will kill him there, of course, but we intend to wait a day or two until implanted rumor has cut him down a little further. I hate to kill a public man when he is still partly in the public favor. But there is no need to kill him in favor since any man can so easily be turned out of that favor. X, I pick Xavier Cardinal Runosake of Kobe, Japan. And you will bring him to my very door in a little less than nine minutes, will you, X? Or will you prefer to be killed by my slammer here two or three minutes after that.”
“I prefer to bring Runosake here. But he isn't in that little Buddhist compound of Kobe, not right now. He has just escaped. I tell you this to be fair with you.”
The Mogul (that sounded like a nickname for the head of ‘Track and Total’ but the man was really named John Mogul and was usually called ‘The Mogul’) picked up a phone and finger-tapped a call. Calls from Europe go through quickly at that time of the night. The Mogul spoke a few words and listened to a few words. Then he replaced the phone.
“Yes, he escaped the compound not more than ten minutes ago,” The Mogul said, “but he can't have escaped from Kobe yet. And you will have him at my door in another eight minutes? X, if he were in Marseille, he could not get here from the airport in less than one hour. But my Japanese operative said that he had already given me the news of the temporary escape, X. He said that he had given it to me about seven minutes ago.”
“It was about that, Mogul, yes.”
“So you had already entered my apartment then. You took the call in my name and voice. But that wouldn't get the Cardinal a third of the way around the world in almost no time at all. And why, of all the doors in the world, should he come to my door?”
“We will see. Will you know Cardinal Runosake if you see him, Mogul?”
“I know him, yes. Whenever or wherever I see him I will know him. How does it feel when you come right up to the edge of your life, little meddler? You will end not with a bang but with a riddle, eh? But does it not make you a little giddy when you come to the edge of it and look over?”
“It does, Mogul. I have looked over that life brink many times and been giddy every time. If I do bring the Japanese Cardinal to your door in just these couple of minutes, then will you sub-contract the thirteen-part job to me?”
“Not quite. But I'll take you in on it. I will pay you the first princely fee if you do deliver this prince of the congregation to my door. No, I have put the thirteen out on separate contracts, but I can pull any contract when I wish. If you deliver this Cardinal (I'm talking here almost as if it were possible) then I would put out one other contract to you. And, if you were successful on it, I would put out another to you. After all, you can't kill more than one of them at a time, can you?”
“Yes.”
“I can't figure out just what your angle is, X. Unsatisfied curiosity eats me up sometimes. Be a good fellow, X, and tell me what your angle is, before you die.”
“Yes. I'll probably tell it to you before I die. Maybe I'll tell it to you, someday, just before you die. But I won't die today.”
“I believe that you will die today, X,” John Mogul said. “I'm a man who is not known to the public. I am a quiet and effacing man. Really, I do efface a lot of people in the course of a year. And I fill a necessary niche. I am a trashman and I do my trashman's part to keep our world and society cleansed. I am a knacker, a dealer in carcasses. We turn their corruptible material, whenever such disposition is possible, into quality soap and essential oils and bone-meal for the farmer. I am a euthanasiast who removes unwanted persons from a world where everyone should be wanted. In each case, there is someone who does not want these persons they put out to contract, so I am doing my part to make this a completely wanted world. But I do not like passionate killers, and I seldom keep more than two or three of them in my stables. They are useful tools sometimes, but I use them with distaste. Coolness and dedication are the things I most like, and the personal satisfaction in jobs well done.”
“Your several guards are coming back from the cantina on the corner now, Mogul, after that fine late drink; and your guard just outside that door has gone to sleep. But a usually reasoned and collected man has moved up to this level of the building, but he's in a state of dull confusion. He moves with cranky steps, and he's near collapse. His feet are even now at the door. Do you hear him?”
“I hear him. But he is not my two-fifteen slammer. Who can he be?”
“I told you who he would be,” X said. “I win the wager. And now you will pay a princely fee on this first dead prince. And then we will agree to certain verbal contracts, and we will share certain other information.”
“It cannot be that,” the Mogul said. “I would know his face if it were he. I will not be taken in by any of your skittish tricks. Why doesn't my guard outside the door stop him? It's like a dead man stalking.”
“Certain peoples do sometimes stalk several steps after they're dead. I told you that your guard outside the door had fallen asleep.”
X and the Mogul had been speaking in Frioul. Really, there are hardly a dozen such neutral languages left which two men of their experienced sort will know and feel easy to discuss in. All others have certain trammels and connotations.
The door was fumbled open. A man, frozen-faced and dully horrifying, quite large for a Japanese, staggered in. He tottered there for a moment. Then he fell forward at full length. There was a knife hilt between his shoulders. There were other weirdly misplaced things about him.
“He's quite dead,” said X. “Shall I turn him over? Did you get a good enough look at his face?”
“I got a good enough look at his face,” the Mogul said. ”He is Cardinal Runosake.”
Much later that morning, John Mogul, a man of some vestigial religion, had a stone cut for Runosake with the words “ — but others, save them, snatching them from the fire.”
Then the Mogul raised his hands over his head with their twelve digits extended. The Mogul had, on each hand, five fingers and one thumb. This extradigitalism was common in the Mogul family. John Mogul was indicating that he still had twelve men on contract to be killed.
5
The business of the bells on the North Coast of San Simeon continued. The main hope, or the main fear, was that it would be widely known that the bells were ringing there, or that they had rung there. A growing legend of the bells would play havoc, and havoc is a two-handed game. It is very hard to keep a noise about bells quiet. Even if all this North Coast's bells were silenced at one time (and, so far, they had not been) there would still be the spreading rumor that bells had rung at this place, and that they were summoning bells. There hadn't ever been bells on that North Coast before, but there had been bells further out, among the ghost shoals. There had been subliminal bells and submarine bells there, for near five hundred years now, just beneath the level of human hearing and just beneath the level of human breathing: sunken-ship bells, sunken-city bells, sunk promontory bells. The bells of the thirteen hundred Spanish and French ships that had sunk in those waters during the maritime centuries were not necessarily silenced. Bells do ring underwater. All sea creatures, from plankton to porpoises, enjoy these water-buried bells. Porpoises and dolphins love bells; they can be talked to by coded bells.
Hundreds of the sunken ship bells have been raised, by fishermen, by private persons, by beachcombers, and set up on stanchions on small reefs and on small islands, so that has always been a musical ocean, up in the Antilles and Indies. Now the booming bells off north of San Simeon gave real authority to what had been a vague chorus, and gave a world-wide call to assemble at a certain place.
It was Count Finnegan who brought the second bell, the Martyr-Bell to the shoal region to join the Sea-Bell. This was two days after the Sea-Bell had first begun to boom. He brought the bell, on a log raft towed by a motor skiff, to a particular mooring-rock. They set it up there on stone stanchions so that the whole mooring rock and stony-bottomed sea thereabouts boomed and pealed with the rocking bronze giant.
The mooring-rock was six hundred yards by three hundred yards. There was a rock-hewn fresh water well there. It was a shaft, ten feet square, that had been cut into the solid and unfissured rock for a cistern to catch rain water; but fresh water had welled up into it from the bottom when it was dug to one hundred feet. And the fresh water had not failed. The shaft had been dug about one hundred years before this.
The mooring-rock was built like a long bowl, with a high ring around it, twice the height of a man. This ring was like a palisade, and the low tide and surf there never broke over it. Inside the palisade, the rock was just about sea level. Parts of it were under two or three feet of water (of fresh water from the rain, not sea water) and parts of it were bare to the sun. For about a hundred and fifty years, people had been bringing soil to this mooring rock, soil taken from islands or parts of the main, or soil dredged from the muddier and more organic parts of the sea. People had built garden plots there which no one could see from the ocean. The ocean-view appearance was of barren rock. These were not large garden plots, for the whole mooring-rock was only about forty acres in extent; but probably fifty people now had permanent homes on that piece of rock, and several hundred people (sharing the secret of this secluded place) moored there at some time during the year. The mooring-rock could only be come to by certain passages through the shoals, and a stranger would leave his wreckage and his bones there before he found a passage by himself.
At least three millionaires were secret sharers in this place and came in season for the deep-sea fishing and the ocean seclusion. Every sort of fisher people came there. Two different tramp-steamers visited the place, one of them four times a year, one of them times a year. But they didn't advertise the place to unworthy ears.
And Count Finnegan had been here before, in his youth, quite some several decades before this. Now Count Finnegan had brought the Martyr-Bell from Ste. Genevieve. The rock people took it and rigged it up and set it to booming on their rock. This was about seven miles from where the Sea-Bell had begun to boom two days before.
And the Ship-Bell, which was onboard a small ship and not land stanchioned, began to move about; and the Martyr-Bell stood fast, but seemed to move (from the tricky sound-carrying winds in the neighborhood). This confused the soldiers who were set to the task of extinguishing the bells. The soldiers swore that both of them were ghost bells.
It had been in the year 1594 that English raiders in the service of the Queen had come to the Island of Ste. Genevieve and had murdered thirty-nine Christian people of color who had refused to abjure their faith. Thereupon the English ship, the Lord Cramner, had been shipwrecked on a shoal only nine sea miles from Ste. Genevieve, and all aboard had drowned. Several bronze cannon of the Lord Cramner had then been raised by people of Ste. Genevieve and brought to their island. The bronze had been cast into the Martyr-Bell. The bell was set up to seaward. For four hundred years it rang of itself whenever Englishmen or other enemies of the Faith approached the island.
Then one day, some people of the Island (in the spirit of prophecy) went out and intercepted Count Finnegan who was going down ocean in a speed launch. Some of the old men of them remembered Count Finnegan from their childhoods, but now he was younger than they were. Count Finnegan said that he would do whatever they asked him to do; he said that he had been searching and listening for Prophetic Instruction, and that he felt that the very air and sea around him were crackling with such instruction now. The people told him the history of the bell and they told him he was to take it South to a place he would know. It was to be set up there and set to pealing an invitation to good people to come, not a warning to evil people to stand off. So Count Finnegan towed the bell to the mooring rock in the shoal water north of San Simeon. And once it was set up there, it rang for three years at least.
At mooring rock Count Finnegan asked old men about a room or cave, down in the rock and below sea level, that he remembered. It could be reached, he recalled, by a sort of passage from the hewn well-shaft. Count Finnegan said that, as well as he remembered, it was a room large enough to hold fifty people. Now the whole interior of the well-shaft was grown with wonderful green vines till it was an absolute joy to look at. But was the passage to that subterranean room still known, or was it forgotten behind the vines?
Oh, it was still there, the old men said, but it hadn't been used for a very long time. The passage and the room would be used again when there was a special reason for their use, and not before.
Count Finnegan sold the speed launch to a rich man who was on the rock. Then he took passage on the tramp steamer that came there twice a year and had come there now. He went away on the tramp, listening intently for more Prophetic Instruction.
It was two weeks later that the Peter-Bell was brought to the mooring rock. It was brought there in a ship that was actuall
y named the Argo; the name was painted boldly in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Chaldee letters. This was a sail-ship, but it approached the mooring rock at swift speed and exactly against the wind, and its sails billowed out full and evenly against the wind, corning in contrary direction. It was square-sailed and had no lateen or coastwise sail at all.
The man on the Argo (only one man was to be seen there) had his face covered with a golden scarf or veil or mask with eye-slits in it. He said that his veil mask was made from combings of the Fleece itself, that the original fleece of Colchis can have gold tufts combed out of it and not be diminished by their loss.
The man said that he had brought one of the nine hundred and ninety-nine Peter-Bells from St. Peter's in Rome. And he unloaded it with his ship's boom. Then the man gave the people on the rock some flat unleavened bread or ship-biscuit from the Black Sea, and red wine which he said was from the Persian Sea.
The man went away again in the same direction from which he had come. The wind had shifted around by then, and he once more went with full sails and at great speed directly against the wind.
In the month that followed, the people obtained and put up about a hundred more bells along the limestone north coast of San Simeon, and in its salt swamps and outcroppings and islets in all the shoal waters as far as Campche Bank and Perez Island.
6
John Mogul, the chief of ‘Track and Total’, held up his hands with six digits extended on one of them and five on the other, to indicate that eleven of his primary targets were left alive and two of them were dead. He recited a little verse that was both a crowing and a prediction, and rope-jumping children in West Chicago and in Surabaja Java had it instantly, each group in its own tongue:
More Than Melchisedech Page 73
