Frederik Pohl - The Cool War

“Smart, though,” said Dieter. “It’s one of ours.”

Yosper frowned, then shook his head. “They’re a crafty pair. You’re right. If the Eye-ties had found pieces of this, we would’ve taken the rap, and, man, we all would’ve been in the soup! They must’ve got it when they were working on the North Sea job.”

Hake sat up. “Hey! Are you saying they worked for you?”

“Not any more. They take their work too seriously, Hake. Killing’s against our charter,” he said virtuously, “except in unusual circumstances. But they like it. You’re lucky to be alive. If you hire them and don’t want killing it costs extra, would you believe it?”

“I don’t understand you people,” Hake said.

“Because we use mercenaries? Grow up, boy! Don’t get means mixed up with ends. We’re doing right. The Reddis are only tools we use when we have to. You don’t ask a gun if it believes in democracy. You just want to know that when you pull the trigger it’ll go off.” He handed the box back to Mario. “In the old days,” he went on severely, forbearingly, “we understood that. I don’t blame you for getting mixed up now. How can you give it all you’ve got when you’re told we must never drop a bomb or fire a rocket or kneecap an enemy or blow up a bridge? But those are the rules. We don’t make them. We just do what we’re told—and we use what we have to to do it.”

Hake sat back, letting the words wash over him. Yos-per’s morals were not a concern of his, he told himself. He had other concerns, and he was not in the least sure of how to handle them, or how they were going to come out He found himself studying Mario and Dieter, who sat in rapt attention to the old man. Precisely as if they hadn’t heard all this before, as they surely had; exactly as if it were worth hearing at all. It was very strange that everyone he met—Yosper, Dieter, Mario, Leota, even Jessie Tunman, even the Reddis—behaved as if they were all quite sure of their role in the world and the righteous necessity of getting on with it. While he wasn’t sure at all. And Yosper kept right on talking:

“—old days at the United Nations, shee-it! We knew who was who! Knew how to handle them, too. Get a Rumanian charge d’affaires in bed with a nigger boy and show him the photographs, then he’d come along! Or hook a Russian code clerk on heroin and hold his supply up. World was a lot simpler then, and if you want my opinion better. We were doing God’s work and we knew it. ‘Course, we still are, but sometimes— Ah, well,” he twinkled, “you’re getting tired of hearing me, aren’t you, boy? And those lumps on your head probably don’t feel too good, and you’re likely getting hungry. Dietz, you get rid of that thing—” he nodded toward the bomb— “and, Mario, you bring the car around. Champagne’s all gone, and it’s about time we ate.”

The questions in Hake’s mind all wanted to be central, and all kept colliding with one another. How seriously, for instance, should he take his deal with the Reddis to “turn”? They hadn’t actually released him; he had been rescued. But still they might have their ways to enforce cooperation. And before he had that one even properly sorted out, much less solved, there was another: Had Leota really gotten safely away, and where was she now? And that was nudged away by, What about the Team project for supporting messianic religions? What about for God’s sake his church? Was it getting along without him? How much reality was there in Leota’s crazy conjecture about being hypnotized? And back to wondering if Leota was safe.

The advantage of a head full of unsorted thoughts and problems was that it kept his mind off Yosper’s interminable chatter. Which went on as they moved between the great double-walled spheres of hydrogen, became louder as they cut between the thumping compressors that kept the hydrogen liquid, recessed briefly as they stood by the immense hot-air vents that roared 150-degree waste heat into the already sultry Italian sky—there was some risk that one of the not very alert fuel-depot guards might hear—and resumed full momentum in the Cadillac that Mario steered athletically along the waterfont, up through a tangle of climbing, narrow streets and into the parking lot of a huge hotel atop the Vomero. Hake was given twenty minutes to clean himself up, pat water on his bruises and change into fresh clothes out of the bags that Mario had obligingly brought from Capri, and then it was a reprise of the night before at La Morte del Pescatore. They had, again, the best table in the house. It looked out over the Bay, with Vesuvius’s cratered peak illuminated in red, white and green searchlights a dozen miles away, and Yosper was saying, “Veal, Hake! If you don’t want fish, take veal; it’s the only kind of meat the Italians understand, but they know it well.” The pills that Leota had given him had

long since worn off. His jaw and belly felt as if cattle had stampeded over them. He was exhausted—it had been a shock to him to find that it was still only nine o’clock at night by the time they reached the hotel—and he felt as if he were running a temperature. But the thing he was sickest of was the sound of Yosper’s voice. The old man was engaged in a lengthy debate with the waiter on what proportion of Parmesan cheese should go into the softer base in his scaloppine alia Vomero cordon bleu, and with the wine steward on whether the Lacrima Christi really came from the vineyards on Mount Vesuvius, or was something their bottiglieria cooked up out of grape husks and hydrochloric acid that afternoon.

Hake ordered at random, wanting nothing more than to get it over and get to bed—and, as soon as possible, back to Long Branch, New Jersey. When Yosper tried to guide him to a specialty of the house, he snarled, “Anything! I don’t care. I didn’t come here to spend the taxpayers’ money on gin mills!”

Yosper gave him a level stare and sent the waiter away. When he was gone, the old man said, “Hake, two things you should remember. First, you don’t talk about working for the government when anybody you don’t know is listening. Second, this isn’t costing the taxpayers a dime. Not ours, anyway. Dieter, who are we sticking with this one?”

“I was going to use my Barclay card,” the Dutch boy said. “It goes to KLM.”

Yosper nodded, grinning. “That gets charged to the airline, who charge it to a special account that turns out to be unauditable funds for the Dutch spooks. There’s no way they’ll trace it to us. Let’s see, on Capri I think we used the Banco di Milano credit, which goes through the Italian hydroelectric syndicate to their Air Force Intelligence. You know how to handle the computers, you can get anything you want—and the enemy pays for it! So eat hearty, boy. Every lira you spend takes one away from the other side.”

He paused, and said to Dietrich, “That reminds me. Will you check on that other matter?” The boy nodded and slipped away, as the waiter came back with platters of raw vegetables and antipasto.

Chewing the crunchy celery and hearts of palm turned out to be an ordeal for Hake. Half of his molars felt loose in their sockets, and protested the force of his jaw. He ate sullenly, doggedly, staring out across the gentle bay. With the festooned lights of the cruise ships at the docks, the cars along the waterfront, the distant villas on the Portici and Torre del Greco shore it was both lovely and awful— so terrible a waste of energy that he could not understand why it was tolerated, or how it failed to sink the Italian economy. To be sure, the farms and peasant villages were practicing stricter economies than anything in New Jersey, he knew. But that made this prodigious waste even more immoral. There *vas something very sick in the world he lived in. And if the healers, or the people who thought they were healing it, were all like Yosper, what hope was there for even survival? The old man was holding forth on religion again. It was God’s plan for the world, he was saying, that the righteous should survive and conquer; and the words beat against Hake’s inner thoughts confusingly. Then he did a double take on a phrase of Yosper’s and demanded, “What did you say?”