“I gather you’re not a believing member of the parish.”
“Do I sound like a Christian to you?” he asked, and laughed softly, not as if he were remarking on his ruthless criminality but as if Christian were a synonym for brain-dead troglodyte.
I said, “Back to your second option. You remember that?”
“I kill you now, play dumb, say I never met you.”
“Won’t work,” I told him. “They know I’m here right now.”
“They who?”
“My handlers in…the agency.”
He looked dubious. “They can’t know.”
“Satellite tracking.”
“You aren’t carrying a transponder. We searched you at the church.”
“Surgically implanted.”
A little venom seeped into his twinkling Irish eyes. “Where?”
“Very tiny, efficient device. Could be my right buttocks. Could be my left buttocks. Could be in an armpit. Even if you found it, cut it out, and crushed it, they already know I’m here.”
He sat back in his chair and gradually repaired the politician demeanor that had begun to break down. He took an Almond Joy from his shirt pocket and began to unwrap it. “You like half?”
“No.”
“You don’t like Almond Joy?”
“You were going to kill me.”
“Not with poison candy.”
“It’s the principle of the thing,” I said.
“You don’t take sweets from men who threaten to kill you.”
“That’s right.”
“Well…more for me.” After he had enjoyed a bite of the Almond Joy, he said, “So there’s only option three. This is where I figured we would wind up. Which is why I had to trust you and tell you my situation. I can make you very rich.”
“What happened to ‘Every man for himself’?”
“Son, I like you, I do, and I see my best option is co-opting you, but I wouldn’t in a million years give you a piece of my cut. I’m surprised I offered you half of the candy bar.”
“I appreciate your honesty.”
“If I’m to trust you, then you’ve got to have good reason to trust me. So from now on, only truth between us.”
Because he smiled at me so sincerely and because it would have been rude not to reciprocate, I returned his smile.
In the spirit of frankness that the chief encouraged, I felt it necessary to say, “In all honesty, I don’t believe that Utgard Rolf is the kind of generous fellow who would share his cut with me.”
“You’re right, of course. Utgard would kill his own mother for a thousand dollars. Or maybe it was five thousand.”
He ate more candy, and I digested the proposition that he had made to me.
After what seemed enough time for serious consideration, I said, “So, supposing I have a price—”
“Everyone has a price.”
“Who would meet mine?”
“The men backing this operation have some of the deepest pockets on the planet. They have a contingency fund. At this late hour, with so much on the line, if you join us and share what your agency knows or suspects, tell us the reason you were sent here, and if you feed them false information, you can be a very rich man, too, living in a wonderful climate under a name no one will ever discover.”
“How rich?”
“I don’t know the size of the contingency fund. And I would have to speak with a representative of our financiers, but I suspect they would consider you so valuable to this enterprise that they would find twenty-five million for you.”
“What about my partner? Annamaria?”
“Do you have a thing for her?”
“No. We just work together.”
“Then you tell us where she is, we kill her tonight. We put the body through a meat grinder, dump the sludge at sea, gone forever.”
“Let’s do it.”
“That was quick.”
“Well,” I said, “I don’t see an alternative, because I’m not giving her a piece of my cut.”
“No reason you should.”
“In the right part of the world,” I said, “twenty-five million is like a hundred million here.”
“Live like a king,” the chief agreed, finishing his candy. “So, my new rich friend, what’s your name?”
“Harry Lime,” I said.
He held out his hand. I reached across the table and shook it.
I was not thrown back into the dream. Evidently, it happened only on first contact with one of these conspirators.
The chief said, “I’ve got to go talk to the money man, close the deal. I’ll be back in five minutes. One thing he’ll want to know.”
“Whatever. We’re partners.”
“How the hell did you do that?”
“Do what?”
“How did you pass the dream to Utgard and me? The dream, the vision, whatever you want to call it.”
“I don’t know exactly how. You triggered it, I think. Because you’re the people going to make it come true.”
Wide-eyed, a third Hoss Shackett sat before me now, neither the hard-case sadist nor the charming politician. This chief possessed a capacity for wonder that neither the baby-killer nor the baby-kisser shared.
This chief might have had the ability to commit a selfless act or an uncalculated kindness, because wonder admits to the existence of mystery, and the recognition of mystery in the world allows the possibility of Truth. The other two wouldn’t let this chief surface often. I was surprised that they had not already drowned him forever.
He said, “What are you, anyway? Some kind of psychic? I never believed in psychics, but what you put in my head, that was for damn sure real.”
Recognizing that we live in a distressed culture where anything like a conspiracy theory will be embraced by more people than will the simple and obvious truth, I tried to make it easier for Hoss Shackett to accept my otherness:
“The government has a drug that facilitates clairvoyance,” I lied.
“Sonofabitch.”
“It doesn’t work with everyone,” I said. “You have to carry a certain combination of genes. There aren’t many of us.”
“You see the future?”
“Not really, not directly. Things come in dreams. And they’re never complete. Just pieces of a puzzle. I have to do police work, just like you, to fill in what’s missing.”
“So you saw Magic Beach in your dream, and the nukes.”
Trying not to react to the word nukes, I said, “Yeah.” I suppose I had known all along.
“But in the dream, you didn’t see me or Utgard?”
“No.”
“What you put in my head, the sea all red and the sky—it seemed like the nukes were going off right here on the beach. That’s not how it’ll be.”
“The dreams are fragmentary, sometimes more symbolic than full of real details. Where will the bombs be detonated?”
He said, “Where it matters. In cities. In a few weeks. All on the same day. We’re just bringing them ashore and distributing. The major seaports and airports, they’re blanketed with radiation detectors.”