Bauer hesitated. “Nobody said… nobody came right out “
Lessing glared at him. “You’re stupid, Bauer, really stupid. If I am thumbing, then this is my chance to finish you off! Inside our fence, nobody questions Indoco’s business. You could vanish without a trace!” He spread his hands on the table, palms up. “But think: if I’m not thumbing my squad, then I am going to find out where the rumor started and what I can do about it. If I have to kill… or worse… to keep my reputation clean, I will. Either way, you lose.” He began to get to his feet. “Do we chat easy? Or hard?”
“Look, please ” Bauer’s eyes reflected the flickering light
“We have a room in the garage,” Lessing remarked. “We keep our auto repair tools there. It’s soundproof.”
“Gott, I never meant… I only wanted—”
“Who, Bauer? Who?”
“Copley… in Paris. He never said you were thumbing. Just that… some people around you might die! I… I took him to mean… I imagined he meant…” Bauer shifted his grip on his beer bottle, holding it horizontally so that he could smash it against the table edge and jab it into his adversary’s eyes. Bauer had studied barroom brawling with experts.
So had Lessing. He pointed. “Go ahead, try. The table is woven rattan, and there’s a good chance the bottle won’t break. Do you want to take that chance?” He smiled.
Bauer sat back down. “Just give me your word, a? No harm to me. I don’t want to know anything. I could even pay you… a little.” He tapped his rumpled shirt pocket.
“I don’t want your goddamn money. There’s nothing to know. No thumbing. And I can’t protect either of us until I know what’s going on.”
“Then why? Why Hjellming and Hollister? Why Copley? He gossips a lot with the Euro-mercs. He must’ve heard something.”
“He heard rumors! Just crap. Bullshit. Talk!”
“Hjellming and Hollister… they weren’t just talk,” Bauer muttered defiantly.
Lessing made a derisive noise. “Personal grudges? Violent crime? It’s going the rounds, you know.”
Bauer took the remark seriously. “No. Not so. You assassinate execs. You kidnap execs and technicians. You shoot spies. But nobody kills off-duty mercenaries! We’re only the soldiers, the Soldaten, the muscles and the bones.” He paused and then finished on a defensive but stubborn note: “Why should Copley lie? He said people around you might die!”
“Who’s going to kill them, goddammit? Who? Indoco?” Lessing relaxed a trifle, still keeping a wary eye on Bauer’s bottle.
Bauer had regained both his composure and a measure of defiance. “How should I know? Copley only made warnings about you. Maybe somebody else thumbs you too, later.”
Bauer sounded crazier than Lessing had thought. He stifled a yawn. It would be good to rid himself of this unwanted guest and get back upstairs to Jameela. It was going on three in the morning!
The German peered into the beer bottle, but it was empty. “It was the job… the New Mexico thing… I think.”
“What about it?” It was Lessing ‘s turn to sound defensive. “Hell, Indoco owed me a vacation, and I needed the money. An agent I know made me an offer: see the American Southwest on the budget plan! His plan and his budget! I did what I was told, and I got paid. I don’t ask, and I don’t tell.”
“Yes, but….” Bauer pursed his lips, the picture of a prissy, European bureaucrat. Then: “You have seen nothing, been told nothing?”
Lessing pressed one hand to his pajama-top. “Nothing. Scout’s honor.”
Bauer missed the sarcasm. “Truly? Nothing?”
“Not a thing. All we get out here are student protesters: ‘Yankee, go home!’ That sort of stuff. The police stand around until they think we’re going to be overrun, then they make a lathi charge and knock a few heads. It’s a local ritual, like the peacock’s mating dance!”
Bauer blinked at him.
Lessing said, more kindly, “Look, it’s too late for you to go back to Lucknow tonight. Stay over here and take it easy. We can put you up. Tomorrow, after breakfast, we’ll talk. Hell, maybe Wrench can gel you a security job at the factory.”
“A post? No… I….”
“You frightened of contamination? Pollution? Cyanide-laced rosewater? Radioactive kumkum powder? That’s what the Indians claim we make here.” He grinned to show he was joking.
Bauer only stared at him wide-eyed. “I have to get back. My… my taxi is waiting, down by the factory gatehouse. The driver is drinking tea with your watchmen.“He got to his feet: stiff, dignified, determined, and apologetic all at once. “Thank you.”
Lessing let him go. He couldn’t blame the German for not trusting him. Who would? He watched Bauer march down the walk and out of sight around the six-car garage. Then he trudged back upstairs to the air-conditioned company flat he shared with Jameela.
If somebody had it in for their squad, why hadn’t they come for him? After all, he was the mission leader. Yet he hadn’t heard or seen a thing. His trouble-smelling instinct had never failed him yet. Was he becoming complacent? Senile? Blind in his old age?
He decided — tentatively — that Bauer was probably suffering from battle fatigue: the “mere jerks,” as the tabloids cutely named the syndrome.
The three-room flat in the squarish, whitewashed senior-staff quarters building was semi-dark; only Lessing’s imitation Aladdin’s lamp — electric, with a 220-volt bulb instead of a wick and oil — burned dim in what the Indoco employment brochures gushingly described as “the sitting room.” The flat was hot and stuffy; even the big, German air-conditioning unit couldn’t cope with India’s heat.
Jameela was asleep in the bedroom, one slender arm flung out upon Lessing’s pillow, a tumble of raven-wing hair visible above the thin sheet. She stirred, and Lessing paused to look at her. Unlike American women with their broader shoulders and boyish waists, Jameela Husaini came from a softer and more curvaceous mold. She reminded Lessing of the Ajanta frescoes: an oval face with a high forehead; long-lashed eyes; skin the hue of old gold (“like a South German on a cloudy day,” Wrench said); a tall, slender, long-legged figure; firm, uptilted breasts; a narrow waist; and thighs like some Hindu goddess from a sculptured frieze. He had once tried to tell Jameela how much he preferred her beauty to American angularity, but he was not good with words. She took him to mean that her hips were — to be blunt — fat, and she hadn’t forgiven him for a month. She still played tennis furiously every morning with Indoco’s seven European women staffers, and he knew how jealous she was of the prettiest of them. She had no need to be; it was they who envied her.
He did not wake her but lay down close by upon the thin, hard mattress. Jameela moved against him, and he began to spiral down into sleep, her unbound tresses tickling his shoulder and filling his nostrils with pungent, jasmine perfume.
Yells and noise ripped the fabric of his dream to shreds.
He sat up, groaned, combed back his thin, ash-blonde hair, and fumbled his way out onto the flat’s tiny balcony. He hadn’t dreamed it; there were more noises below. He looked out over black-satin darkness, the impenetrable night of India, to the tangled, diamond spider webs of the factory’s lights: strings of bulbs hung on every tank, pipe, catwalk, and tower, turning the prosaic factory into fairy spires and oriental palaces, richer than Sindbad, more wondrous than the Thousand and One Nights. He squinted down into the courtyard closer by, just beneath the balcony. In the stark glare of the gate floodlights he saw a dancing jumble of white pants, white shirts, white teeth, black beards, and dark faces and skins, like cut-up scraps of a black-and-white photograph tossed into the air. At first he could make out nothing.