The Western Lands Read online

  "Sois sage," the doctor says, with a crushing handshake.

  And now for the list. There are five former SS in Tangier on the Allies' list of wanted war criminals. He knows some of the names on his list are posing as Jewish refugees.

  Ah, yes, here we are, Doctor Wellingstein. A former concentration camp doctor. I've got him on my list.

  The Doctor is cool and reserved.

  "So what can I do for you?" He makes a point of speaking in English. Kim has made it clear that the visit is not medical.

  The Doctor receives him in a small parlor with chairs and a couch upholstered in blue satin, a glassed-in bookcase, all of it as dead and unlived-in as the Doctor himself—a tall, gaunt man with something dank and cold and dead in his face. Kim helps himself to schnapps from a carafe on the coffee table. Réalités, Der Spiegel, neatly laid out. Kim walks around the apartment looking at the pictures.

  "Hummmm, Klee . . . Monet . . ."

  "They are reproductions, of course."

  "Very good reproductions, I'd say."

  "What do you want?"

  "Oh, I might be interested in buying some of your, uh, reproductions. Just arrived in Tangier. Place is a bit bare you know. Now, that"—he points to a small Klee—"would brighten up my digs."

  "This isn't a shop. It's not for sale. And now, if you will excuse me."

  Kim stands up. "Of course, Doctor Unruhe."

  The Doctor's face freezes. "I think you have me confused with someone else."

  "Perhaps, but a phone call to the War Crimes Commission, or whatever they call themselves, could clear up the confusion." Kim picks up his hat.

  "Wait! Who are you?"

  "A simple soldier of the Third Reich . . . misled like all the German people . . . Waffen SS."

  The Doctor speaks in German. "Sit down, we will talk. Let me get a decent schnapps."

  After a sehr gemütlich little chat with Kim, the Doctor puts his fingertips together. "I think that I can put you in the way of some profitable employment. You see, the Swiss are not pleased with the situation here in Tangier . . . secret banking facilities . . . a second Switzerland . . . this they do not like. I could introduce you to a man here . . . a Swiss."

  The Doctor makes a phone call. "He will be in the Parade Bar at seven this evening. He walks with a cane."

  Kim stands up to go. "You may rely on my discretion, Doctor. You see, I am more interested in employment than money. . . . Oh, yes, I would advise you to remove your reproductions to a bank vault."

  The Parade Bar is in an arcade of jewelry shops and gold merchants, a blank black expanse of plate glass, a heavy glass door. The interior is dark, the atmosphere menacing and transient. You can hear time ticking away to disaster. Behind the bar is a middle-aged man who looks like a saintly old convict.

  Kim orders a martini, which seems to materialize in front of him. "We are moving next month," the bartender tells him.

  "Looks like a bank in here," Kim says.

  The bartender nods matter-of-factly and walks down the bar to replenish a middle-aged female lush.

  It is just a few minutes past seven. This must be my contact. The cane comes in first. A black cane followed by a thin man in a black suit with black glasses. He seems to feel with the cane and there is about him a suggestion of blindness. But he comes directly to Kim and sits down on the barstool next to him. "Ah," he says, "you are Doctor Wellingstein's young friend." The hand he offers is as cool and dry as a bank note.

  The bartender walks to the other end of the bar.

  The man speaks as if referring to a computer readout. "The situation here is unsound but unfortunately has attracted unattached capital. This is of course regrettable. Perhaps if prospective investors became aware of exactly how dangerously unstable . . . I think a demonstration could be arranged." He passes a large manila envelope to Kim. "Read this. Financial arrangements will be through the Banque de Genève."

  Qualitative data can be processed on the computer by assigning numerical value to a spectrum of affective states: Does the concept of a hog in a mosque elicit in the subject:

  1. Indifference

  2. Distinct displeasure

  3. Anger

  4. Rage

  5. Homicidal rage

  We are shooting for a five . . . incidents, you know . . . recorded hog calls in mosques and Moslem cemeteries . . . hogs released from concealed pens and trucks.

  We need a team of professional riot leaders like La Bomba, the Bomb, who started a soccer riot in Lima that claimed three hundred and fifty-two victims. (The soccer scores are coming in from the Capitol . . . one must pretend an interest.)

  And the Whisperer. He can leave words . . . the right words . . . in the air just behind him as he glides through crowds in the markets. And some straight, old-line political agitators.

  Do we use actual hogs? Of course not. We tape the riot that would be precipitated by the intervention of hogs. Tapes of previous riots with hog noises cut in played back by fast-moving operatives as our agitators move in behind the tapes to incite the gathering crowds.

  Raw menace in the air like a haze. A middle-aged European (he turned out to be Swiss) is trying to make himself inconspicuous as he scuttles for his hotel on the edge of the Socco Grande. He is one of those gray, almost invisible presences who can suddenly stand out raw and naked like a man abusing himself in the crowded market.

  Oh Christ, it's happening! They SEE him! Someone pushes him hard from behind. He stumbles forward and falls. Feet thud into his ribs and face. He struggles to get up, hands clutching pulling tearing, a sound like ripping cloth as the Spanish Legionnaires called in by the British open up with machine guns on the crowd from shop roofs overlooking the Socco Grande. Screaming, trampling, running for the side streets. All over in a few seconds, leaving twenty-three dead.

  Big money, like a frightened octopus, turned green and siphoned away . . . back to Switzerland, west to the Caymans, the Bahamas, Uruguay. . . .

  The Edelweiss, with its moldy deer heads, sour beer and fermented sauerkraut and the specifically Swiss smell of a thousand years of thawing garbage spilling down from sordid villages perched on mountainsides and unwashed goiters, gives notice that Asunción is yet another Switzerland. They've captured the Swiss smell, the reek of its hinterland, and now the money will follow. Unless, of course . . .

  Kim Lee sits with Allerton, his contact, at a black oak table with a soiled white-and-red-checked tablecloth, a small portion of whiskey in a dirty glass.

  Allerton was a thin, blond man with an air of arrested age. He seemed to float a few inches above the ground, wafted here and there, a specialized organism at once torpid and predatory. His hair was blond but the eyebrows were black and sharp as pencil lines, and slightly arched, giving him a startled look— startled, but never dismayed. He was American, couldn't be anything else somehow, by the lack of any definite cultural imprint.

  There is something cold and fishy behind his easy affability, the way he can slip in anywhere and establish immediate rapport. He is in fact the perfect agent, lacking only dedication. A washout from the CIA for an elaborate computerized swindle of one of the Company's proprietaries, so elaborate that the Company backed off from inquiring too closely. He was allowed to resign with minimal prejudice. Then Allerton went to work for the Swiss navy and the second Switzerland was left with the Swiss stink, their currency pressed right down to the paper.

  Kim Lee had the list. Allerton had some shaky Mossad connections from a stint in Saudi Arabia where the Jews bought minor information from him with bad whiskey. Like conquistadors, they head into the perilous jungles of Uruguay, sustained by a pure flame of avarice: "Get rich. Sleep till noon. And fuck 'em all!"

  Allerton, despite his basic coldness, is a loyal friend and reliable backup. He intends to buy a liquor store. Kim Lee will open a restaurant. One set menu every day. Makes it easier to shop thataway. A few chickens. It's the only way to live. Modest objectives were to become the keystone of Margaras Un
limited, a series of modest goals leading to a series of modest achievements which became at some point quite considerable.

  With Allerton in a moving house. Clutter the Glind. We are moving south. There is a back hall and a small back room that can serve as bedrooms. I say that the speed has to be reduced or the motors will burn out surer'n Sunday petting a phantom phallus wrapping the target in pulsing fur. . . . Despite his basic coldness. Society note of a black reliable backup Margaras tar weapons the crest of a country auto hairdo coming to a policy delineated by what Burn's hole won't take in a fighting suit of Glind screams the captain of what one can pull on south. There is a back hall be removed the lips can serve as bedrooms start to rotate be reduced or the motors will cut a gaping hole so fast January 20 arrested by a phantom extendable ear. Stiff loyal fried and good one leg cut oft" reference to a secret service without cat caught in a steel trap. We are moving flesh with special attributes and a small back room that grows in place. Someone offers me the management of a bar in Nova Scotia.

  And that is what we did, move a phantom organization to Asunción. No KGB to pull us back to Home Center and no Home Center to get pulled back to, and that is how we conceived Margaras Unlimited, a secret service without a country. Its policy is delineated by the jobs it won't take. Come level on average, MU takes the usual secret service assignments: assassinations, riot incitement, revolutions, collapses of currencies, collection and sale of information. There was only one existing agency even remotely similar and that was Interpol. Since Interpol was staffed to a large extent by ex-Nazis, some of them on Kim's list, we were soon firmly entrenched and in possession of vast criminal files from which we could recruit agents by the threat of exposure and extort money in return for expungement from the files and consequent freedom to operate.

  We transformed Interpol from a passive bureau of criminal information, without power of search, seizure or arrest, into a supernational police force with full power of arrest, search and seizure, extracting information from all police and intelligence agencies while owing fealty to none.

  Before they knew where their Margaras disks were, we were into the files of the KGB and the CIA like a swarm of mole crickets. Our computer files are in many locations, mostly America, owing to the lack of police surveillance; also in South America with our travel agencies; in Scandinavia with Nudist magazine; in Switzerland, the copies in bank vaults. Our technicians move from center to center easily since they are not trailing wires to Moscow Center, MI-5, Langley, Tel Aviv and other marginal agencies.

  The Swiss are going soft on the heavy money toilet, and no second Switzerlands are rearing their assholes now that the IRS is cracking down on the Caymans and the Bahamas. Any agencies I've forgotten? Nationalist China? The sinister mafia of Vietnam? The old Union Corse not to be underestimated? The Vatican cannot be overestimated. All the pressure groups. We trail no wires. Our policy is SPACE.

  Anything that favors or enhances space programs, space exploration, simulation of space conditions, exploration of inner space, expanding awareness, we will support. Anything going in the other direction we will extirpate. The espionage world now has a new frontier.

  2

  Joe the Dead lowered the rifle, like some cryptic metal extension growing from his arm socket, and smiled for a fleeting moment. A blush touched his ravaged features with a flash of youth that evaporated in powder smoke. With quick, precise movements he disassembled the telescoping rifle and silencer and fitted the components into a toolbox. Behind him, Kim Carsons and Mike Chase lay dead in the dust of the Boulder Cemetery. The date was September 17, 1899.

  Joe walked away from the Cemetery, back toward Pearl Street and the center of town, whistling a dry raspy little tune like a snake shedding its skin. He made his way to the train station, bought a ticket to Denver and took a shot of morphine in the outhouse. Two hours later he was back in his Denver stronghold.

  No regrets about Kim. Arty type, no principles. And not much sense. Sooner or later he would have precipitated a senseless disaster with his histrionic faggotries . . . a chessman to be removed from the board, perhaps to be used again in a more advantageous context.

  Mike Chase was slated for a disastrous presidency, replete with idiotic legislation, backed by Old Man Bickford, one of the whiskey-drinking, poker-playing evil old men who run America from the back rooms and clubhouses. Nothing upsets someone like Bickford more than the sudden knowledge that an unknown player is sitting in on a game he thought was all his. Such men cannot tolerate doubt. They must have everything sewed up tight.

  Joe could of course throw in with Bickford—another sinking ship, only sinking a bit slower. Laissez-faire capitalism was a thing of the past that would metamorphose into conglomerate corporate capitalism, another dead end. A problem cannot be solved in terms of itself. The human problem cannot be solved in human terms. Only a basic change in the board and the chessmen could offer a chance of survival. Consider the Egyptian concept of seven souls, with different and incompatible interests. They must be welded into one. Otherwise the organism remains wide open to parasitic attack.

  There were a number of valid reasons for eliminating Kim and Chase. They were jointly responsible for the death of Tom Dark. Chase set it up, Kim rode into it. There is never any excuse for negligence. Joe and Tom belonged to the same ancient guild—tinkers, smiths, masters of fire. . . . Loki, Anubis and the Mayan God Kak U Pacat, He who works in fire. Masters of number and measurement . . . technicians. With the advent of modern technology, the guild gravitated toward physics, mathematics, computers, electronics and photography. Joe could have done this, except he was tied down in Kim's Rover-Boy weapon models, doing what any hack gunsmith could have done.

  But the real reason was PAIN. In a universe controlled and delineated by Kim and his obsession with antiquated weaponry, Joe was in hideous and constant pain. His left arm and side clung to him like a burning mantle. That pain could be alleviated by morphine. The other pain, the soul pain, morphine and heroin could not touch. Joe had been brought back from the Land of the Dead, back from Hell. Every movement, everything he looked at, was a source of excruciating pain.

  The safe that had blown up in his face and nearly killed him was in a warehouse used as a beer drop. Crates of old oranges stacked around . . . the box looked like you could open it with a can opener. Joe carried the blast always with him, a reek of rotten burning oranges, cordite and scorched metal. Joe's withered, blighted face, seared by the fires of Hell from the molten core of a doomed planet.

  As he walked away from the cemetery humming "A Bicycle Built for Two," Joe felt good. For the first time in years the pain was gone. It was like a shot of morphine in fourth-day withdrawal. Killing always brought a measure of relief, as if the pain had been siphoned off. But in this instance the relief was profound, since Kim was an integral part of the pain context. Shoot your way to freedom, Joe thought. He knew the pain would come back, but by then perhaps he would see a way out.

  He turned into Pleasant Street . . . trees and lawns and red brick houses. The street was curiously empty. The dogs were quiet. Just the wind in trembling poplars, and the sound of running water . . . A smell of burning leaves. A boy in a red sweater rode by on a bicycle and smiled at Joe.

  It was just as well that he had concealed his assets and talents. That would make him much harder to locate when Bickford realized things had gone wrong and started looking for the unknown player. Bickford knew about Joe's past, of course, but would have considered him unimportant. A gunsmith, a checker player—not even chess.

  Over the centuries and tens of centuries, Joe had served many men—and many Gods, for men are but the representatives of Gods. He had served many, and respected none. "They don't even know what buttons to push or what happens when you push them. Push themselves out of a job every fucking time."

  Joe is the Tinkerer, the Smith, the Master of Keys and Locks, of Time and Fire, the Master of Light and Sound, the Technician. He knows the how and the when. The why
does not concern him. He has left many sinking ships. "So I am to take orders from a birdbrained posturing faggot? Just leave the details to Joe. . . . Well, he left one too many. They all do."

  He would have to move quickly before Bickford & Co. could recover and close the leak. He knew there was only one man who could effect the basic changes dictated by the human impasse: Hassan i Sabbah: HIS. The Old Man of the Mountain. And HIS was cut off by a blockade that made the Gates of Anubis look like a dimestore lock.

  Joe understood Kim so well that he could afford to dispense with him as a part of himself not useful or relevant at the present time. He understood Kim's attempt to transcend his physical structure, to which he could never become reconciled, by an icy, inhuman perfection of attitude, painfully maintained and refined to an unbearable pitch. Joe turned to a negation of attitude, a purity of function that could be maintained only by the pressure of deadly purpose.

  The simplest task caused him almost unbearable pain, like looking about his workspace and putting every object in its ordained place, each object to be either assigned a place or moved to another room, which resulted in moving one clutter to another place where he would, in time, extend his tidying process until each object had felt the touch of his hand, and those objects that finally belonged nowhere would be arranged into what he called a Muriel, a final expression of random disorder.