Trevis came awake, hearing the slug enter her brain, feeling it bulge her laughing eyes. He read Musashi. Musashi said: Become the enemy. Musashi said: The enemy, shut up inside his own spirit, is a pheasant. You, becoming him, are a hawk. Consider this deeply, Musashi said.
Prince paced. He absently put down Driscoll’s reports, and paced. It was raining; water streamed down the outside of his study windows. Nobody had ever turned up Trevis’s connection with the Bianca broad because until Driscoll’s sieve job nobody had looked.
Prince built himself a strong drink and paced the sumptuous study while he sipped it. The shape of it all was easy to see, now he had the facts. Six years before, he’d gotten in deep and had had to start skimming — using Whittington, bookkeeper of the Dahlgren subsidiary. But Whittington had gotten scared. If he’d talked, the Board would have canceled Prince’s ticket, so Whittington had to go. But then his secretary, Teresa Bianca, got suspicious, so she had to go, too. Afterward, the whole thing seemed to have blown over.
But she must have told things to Trevis before she was hit. So he turned into a drunk just so he could get fired from where he worked and then sober up and get himself hired by the Dahlgren subsidiary. And then, as he was using his brilliance to burrow into the guts of the organization, trying to find out who had ordered the hit, the Board had made him buffer man and had given him Raptor, the ultimate killing machine. He didn’t have to dig any more. He just had to start setting up the men who’d been on the Board when she was killed, one after the other, using Raptor as a personal hit man. And he’d just keep on manufacturing evidence and having Board members killed until he reached Milton Prince anyway. By accident.
Only now it wasn’t going to happen. Because now Prince could reach the killing machine without putting Trevis’s finger on the trigger. He sat down to compose his letter to Raptor.
Porter Edwards was a big easygoing black who ran a one-truck tow service from his junk yard on the mud flats near the river. As he tore open the six-by-nine manila envelope to remove the smaller white envelope, he felt not the slightest curiosity about what was inside. He got twelve hundred bucks a year to not be curious. That money had kept the truck running lots of times, and had paid for the birthing of their fourth child. He wrote a name and address on a manila envelope just like the one he had tom open, and posted it.
The sign said CISCO’S TEXAS TACOS. Cisco shoved the small sealed unaddressed white envelope into a new six-by-nine manila and remembered. Three years ago, three-thirty in the morning, the place deserted and the door open to let out the hot grease smell of deep-frying taco shells as he swept up. A man dressed in black, with black gloves, and wearing a Porky Pig Halloween mask, had come in and taken a stool. Then he had taken a gun with a silencer screwed onto it out of his pocket. His voice had been distorted by the mask.
“Are you interested in a hundred dollars a month, payable twice yearly?”
Cisco, transfixed by the silenced muzzle, managed to say, “Yes.”
“I thought you would be.” And Porky Pig had put the gun away.
The squat man tried to kick Tommy Yet in the stomach. Tommy blocked the kick outward with his left forearm, simultaneously countering with a right forward kick which would have ruptured his opponent if Tommy hadn’t stopped it two millimeters short.
They dropped their arms and bowed. The students clapped.
Tommy Yet was a slight, compact man who could break bones and mangle flesh, smash bricks with his fists, knock down walls with his feet. He also was a Zen Buddhist who revered all life and dealt, not in violence, but in discipline and control.
Unfortunately, three years before, his daughter Perching Bird — named after one of the stylized movements of the Great Circle — had been born with pyloric stenosis. This narrowing of the stomach, which prevented the ingestion of any food, cost ten thousand dollars to correct surgically. When Tommy couldn’t keep up on the loan shark’s three-for-two vigorish, men came around to tell him what they were going to do with his wife and child the following week if he didn’t pay them.
Tommy cast the Ching, which confirmed that he must kill them upon their return, and then kill himself to wash away the stain of the dishonor. But an hour before they showed up, a man walked in with fifteen thousand dollars in cash for the loan shark. All he asked in return was that Tommy forward to a certain post-office box any mail that might come for him.
Tommy never saw the man again.
He locked up the dojo and went out to the car when his wife honked the horn. He asked her to stop at a mailbox on the way home so he could drop in a six-by-nine manila envelope.
At one fifty-four a.m., Raptor leaned forward and thrust a twenty-dollar bill and a long-shanked brass post-office key to the driver through the plexiglass partition which had on it, Thank You for Not Smoking in My Cab. The box to which Tommy Yet had mailed the manila envelope had an automatic forwarding on it to this box. There was a message waiting from Milton Prince.
Our firm now wishes to deal with you direct, as we are terminating the services of our controller as soon as possible. Your rate of renumeration is doubled, effective immediately.
Please advise acceptance through a classified personal ad in the morning newspaper, to Worried from R.
Prince read it in the newspaper a week later.
Worried:
His ski lodge, Saturday night, seven.
Trevis left the office at one-thirty Saturday afternoon with his usual bulging briefcase and trudged across the deserted acre of blacktop company parking lot to find Mr. Prince waiting in the front seat of his two-year-old Datsun hatchback. Prince was wearing heavy clothes and hiking boots.
“I want to go up to that ski lodge of yours, Dunstan.”
Trevis was silent for a few moments. “Well, to tell you the truth, Mr. Prince, it’s more a shack than a—”
“I came prepared,” said Prince jovially and gestured at the pile of equipment in the back of the Datsun. He dropped his voice and leaned closer. “I want to talk to you about something I don’t want the rest of the Board to know.”
When they reached the snowline, where the sleet of lower elevations turned to large wet flakes that hit the windshield and slid down, Prince was still talking.
“In the last few years five of our top people — members of the Board — had to go because they put self-interest ahead of their commitment to the organization. So I need someone at the Board meetings I can trust — someone logical, who understands business practices.”
Trevis pulled off onto the shoulder of the road just beyond a flip-down sign which read, CHAINS REQUIRED BEYOND THIS POINT.
“I’m not a made-man,” he pointed out.
“There’s a way around that. If I can get national approval to expand into the northern half of the state we’ll have to fill Gounaris’s empty seat on the Board. I want you to have that seat, Dunstan.”
He sat in the car, soaking up the heater warmth, as Trevis moved around outside fixing the chains through the thickly falling flakes. That notion of expanding, that was actually a hell of a good idea. Maybe after Trevis was eliminated he’d fly down to the Bahamas, get some sun, put out a few cautious feelers with Bruno as to how the national organization would react to such a move.
After Trevis had got back in, bringing icy air with him, Prince listened to the chains thump in their even, hypnotic rhythm, and wondered how Raptor would do it. This one, he knew, he wanted to watch.
The cabin was a big central room with a couple of little bedrooms partitioned off, and a tiny kitchen in back with a three-burner kerosene stove. Prince wandered around looking at the pictures on the walls with his hands in the pockets of his fancy new down jacket while Trevis got the fine started. The photos were of skiiers, hunters, fishermen, and hikers who had used this place and seemed to enjoy it, all grins and rough clothes.