Frederik Pohl - The Cool War

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.

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.”