The Game of X: A Novel of Upmanship Espionage (6 page)

“Forster, you are fiendishly clever,” I said. “I am willing to admit that now.”

“That is good of you. Will you spare yourself some unpleasantness and tell me where to find Karinovsky?”

“I’d like to know where he is myself,” I said. “He was supposed to meet me here.”

“But he did not come. Where was your secondary meeting place?”

“We didn’t have one.”

“Where is Karinovsky living?”

“I don’t know.”

Forster shook his large and impressive head. “It won’t do, Mr. Nye, it simply will not do. You have had ample time to find out where Karinovsky is. If he didn’t meet you here, then you must have arranged for another place. Tell me.”

I shook my head unhappily.

“I don’t like this, Nye; but you force me to use coercion.”

I started to tell him again that I knew nothing. He cut me short.

“You know, and you will tell,” Forster said.

“Since you refuse to be a good sport about it, you can continue the discussion with my colleague, Dr. Jansen.”

Forster turned away. I tried to think of something to say. Then I sensed movement behind me, and I remembered Beppo. I started to turn, but something hit me across the back of the head, and I lost consciousness.

9

I awoke to find myself playing a fairly important role in a vintage horror film. My wrists were manacled in front of me, and secured around my waist by a length of chain. This in turn was padlocked to a massive iron staple in the wall. Standing up, I found that I could shuffle a few feet from the floor before the chain brought me up short.

I twisted to one side and felt my right-hand jacket pocket. Guesci’s revolver was no longer there. I hadn’t thought it would be, but I was disappointed anyhow.

I examined the handcuffs. They were modern and efficient. My chain was heavy enough to moor a tugboat with. The padlock was new, and the staple was firmly set in the wall.

“Are you satisfied with the preparations?” a voice asked. It was a deep, ominous voice, slightly fruity. Enter the mad perfesser.”

I looked around, and for a moment I saw no one. At last I looked down.

“I am Dr. Jansen,” he said.

He was a dwarf, about two and a half feet high, with a large, finely shaped head and blue pop eyes behind heavy glasses. He wore a dark business suit with a rubber apron over it. He also wore a beard. He looked like a tiny Paul Muni playing a miniature Pasteur.

Another man was sitting against the wall, his face almost lost in the shadows. At first I thought it was Forster, come to watch the fun. But it was only Beppo.

“I have monitored your conversations with Mr. Forster,” Jansen told me. “My impression was of an intelligent man. I certainly hope so. You see, the effectiveness of coercion techniques—that is to say, their net efficiency in terms of time and energy expended—increases with the intelligence of the subject.”

I had never known that. I made no comment on it now. Dr. Jansen, however, seemed used to one-sided conversations.

“Intelligence is, of course, only one factor. Equally important is the patient’s degree of susceptibility. This, in turn, is a function of the imagination. I wonder if you know why these two qualities are of such prime importance?”

“No, sir, I don’t know why,” 1 said.

“Because one is not—simply—tortured. One also tortures oneself.” Dr. Jansen smiled, revealing tiny, even white teeth. I promised myself that some day I would practice painful dentistry on him.

“Without this phenomenon,” Jansen said, “a true science of coercion would be impossible. Brute pain, mindless resistance, and senseless release—that would be the cycle without intelligence and suggestibility.”

I told myself that it was a bluff; nobody was going to torture me, nothing was going to happen. But I couldn’t make myself believe it. The grinning dwarf with the chubby white hands was getting through to me.

“Perhaps,” Jansen continued, “you wonder why I tell you all this?” He smiled subtly and stroked his beard. “It is in order to stimulate the feedback of suggestibility. You must know what to expect, you must brood on it. Your intelligence and your imagination must unleash the supreme torturer within your mind.”

I nodded, not paying much attention to him. I was trying to figure out a way of getting out of here with a whole skin. I would even settle for a partial skin. Suppose I gave Forster an address for Karinovsky, any address? That would buy me some time, but not very much. And it might make things tougher.

“My method,” Dr. Jansen was saying, “is based upon openness. I explain my theories, and I try to answer your questions. But of course, I can never answer them to your satisfaction.”

“Why not?”

“Because all of your questions can ultimately be reduced to one final and unanswerable problem. What you really want, Mr. Nye, is the solution to the old metaphysical problem: Why is there pain? And since I cannot answer that, the very question—following the laws of feedback—tends to potentiate anxiety and augment agony.”

He was watching my face carefully while he spoke, probably observing my reactions. (Pupil distention, facial tic, dryness of lips, pronounced digital tremor.)

“Do you have anything to say concerning Mr. Karinovsky?” he asked.

“I don’t know where he is.”

“Very well,” Jansen said. “We will begin.” Without haste, he took a pair of rubber gloves from his pocket and drew them on. He turned and looked thoughtfully at the instruments hanging from the wall, finally selecting a pair of pincers about five feet long. They were black, rusted and angular, massively and clumsily jointed. They looked like something you’d use to de-joint an ox. Jansen took the handles in both hands and opened and closed them experimentally. They creaked a little, but the jaws closed with a heavy snap.

He advanced slowly toward me with his king-size pliers extended in front of him. I cowered down against the wall, still not quite believing in what was happening. The pincer jaws opened like the ugly square mouth of a snapping turtle. The mouth was gaping wide and moving toward my face, three inches away, then two, and I tried to get away from it by pressing my head through the wall. When that didn’t work I tried to shout, but my throat had shut down. I was so frightened I couldn’t even faint.

Then I heard the sound of fists on the door. Someone was shouting, “I have him, I have Karinovsky! Beppo, give me a hand!”

Beppo sprang to his feet and hurried to the door. He opened it, took two steps up the staircase and grunted. He turned and came back with a very annoyed expression on his face. It took me a moment to realize, that someone had put a knife into his chest, driving it in clear to the black plastic handle.

Through the heavy doors I could hear the faint crackle of gunfire in the corridor. My rescuer was being kept busy.

Beppo tried to pull the knife out. He got it halfway before he collapsed, almost knocking Dr. Jansen over.

Jansen ducked back hurriedly to avoid him. He was still holding the pincers, and he was a little càreless. I managed to grab the free end. I yanked, pulling Jansen off balance before he could let go. As soon as he did, I swung hard with the pincers, hitting him across the ankles and knocking him down. I stretched out and grabbed him by the apron. He screamed and tried to pull away. His apron tore, and he began crawling out of my reach.

I reversed the pincers, pulled the handles open and stabbed out. I caught Jansen’s left biceps between the big snapping-turtle jaws, and I brought the handles together.

Jansen’s breath whistled out of him so fast that he didn’t have time to scream. He writhed around the axis of the pincers like a gaffed salmon, his free hand tearing at the immovable iron mouth. I applied a little more pressure. His face started to turn a yellowish gray. His eyes rolled back into their sockets, and his chin was covered with spittle.

“Give me the key!” I shouted at him. “Give me the handcuff key, or I’ll squeeze your arm into a goddamn paste.”

That was excessively melodramatic, of course; but I was using a psychological approach.

He pulled the key out of his breast pocket and held it out to me. I started to reach for it, then remembered that we were separated by several feet of pincers. I pulled Jansen toward me, then dropped the pincers and took a grip on his throat “Unlock me,” I told him.

He got the handcuffs off, and then unwound the chain from around my waist. I was free. I hit Dr. Jansen behind the ear with a loop of chain, and he went down hard and didn’t move.

I stepped over Beppo and went up the staircase to the corridor. It was dark, and I couldn’t see anyone. I thought I heard footsteps to my left, so I turned right and began to run.

10

I ran down endless marble corridors, and I could hear my footsteps echo from the plaster ceilings. I passed rows of narrow medieval windows, and each of them was covered with a modern steel shutter. There were a lot of them, and I began to think I was running in circles. I had a stitch in my side and a cramp in my leg, but I kept on going. Then I found an unlocked door and I went through it into fog and salt air, and the slick round touch of cobblestones. I was outside.

I was on an insignificant street that ran alongside a stagnant canal. To my left was the mouth of a dark alley, far ahead to my right was the halo of a street light. I was lost. Although I couldn’t be more than a few blocks from San Marco and the Riva degli Schiavoni, I didn’t know in which direction they lay. I turned right and began to pursue the street light.

Venice is an extremely small city unless you want to get somewhere in a hurry. Then its dirty tangle of streets, canals and bridges clings to you like an outrageous old beggar. The city takes on insufferable airs. All of those ridiculous piazzas, small as postage stamps, yet each with five or seven threadlike streets radiating from it—and those endless calles, salizzadas, rios, fondamentas, molos—crossing and recrossing each other like courtiers in a minuet, eternally ready with the exquisite and unnecessary gesture. It is a provincial town pretending to be a metropolis; a superfluous and fantastical monument pretending to be real and necessary. … Go to Venice and look at the monuments, spend money, make love—those are its proper pursuits. But never try to save your life. The eccentric old city resents your practicality.

I passed over a humpbacked little bridge and found myself in a concrete courtyard. Gaunt houses rose on all sides with their backs turned to me. Through their blank stucco walls I could hear the sound of television. When I stopped walking, I felt someone else stop.

I moved quickly toward an alley between the buildings. Behind me I heard a sound like a heavy cough and then a sharp crack as brick dust rained on me. Someone had fired with a silenced gun and had scored the wall near my head.

I ran, crossed canals and went through more alleys, and came into a wide square dominated by a church. I thought I recognized the bulge-eyed stone monster that adorned its battlements: Santa Maria Formosa. I had gone in the wrong direction, to a section I didn’t know. Behind me was a whisper of footsteps.

I went past the church and into another knot of alleys. The stitch in my side was gone, dissolved by terror. I ran like a grass-fed stallion, and the sound of pursuing footsteps slowly diminished behind me. Agent X had done it again.

But I had congratulated myself a little too early. I cantered to the end of the alley, and had to rein short at an unjumpable stone wall. There was another wall to my left. I whinnied in dismay. Venice had sprung one of her little surprises on me.

On the right, ten or twelve feet up, I saw an ornamental iron balcony. I backed away, took a running jump like a Steeplechase winner, caught the bottom edge and pulled myself up to the rail. The balcony creaked heavily. I managed to swing one leg over the rail. In that awkward position I discovered that someone was trying to jab me in the face with a knife.

“Don’t do that,” I said.

“Get off that balcony!” she said. I caught a glimpse of black hair and a billowing bathrobe; then I was trying to ward off the knife and nearly going over the balcony backwards.

“Get off!” she screamed.

“All right,” I said bitterly. “If you’re so anxious to see me killed, I’ll get off your damned balcony.”

She stopped jabbing. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m in trouble,” I said. The girl was American, about twenty-five years old, and nice-looking. No knife-fighter, though.

“I don’t believe you,” she said.

“Of course not,” I said. “Maybe you think I do this for my evening exercise?” She ignored my somewhat hysterical attempt at humor and asked, “What kind of trouble are you in?”

“Serious trouble. Some men are chasing me.”

“Why?”

“At the moment,” I told her, “I’m in no position to explain.”

She looked at me thoughtfully. She was not at all bad-looking. In fact, she could be sensational without the knife. At last she seemed to conclude that I was neither a murderer or a rapist, and perhaps not even a cat-burglar. That left many things I could be, but none of them too much for a Forest Hills girl to handle.