To his relief, Georg saw the Lincoln backing up onto Twenty-fourth Street and then turn at the intersection and drive away along Third. It was quarter to eleven.
At ten to eleven a cab stopped at the corner of Third and Twenty-fourth. A man got out, paid through the open window, and looked around. Having gotten his bearings, he walked toward the intersection. With every step Georg could see him more clearly. He wasn’t one of those Soviet musclemen with white blond hair and Slavic cheekbones, but a thin, balding, older man in a dark blue suit with a blue-and-white striped shirt and a patterned tie. He walked carefully, as if he had recently sprained his ankle.
There were no backup men following him, stealthily hiding behind parked cars. Georg could hear the man’s footsteps as he walked past the terrace, one foot with a strong tread, the other with a light shuffle. He saw him go to the end of Twenty-fourth Street and disappear behind the berm. Again Georg’s eyes scanned the streets, the parked cars, the wrecks, but he didn’t see anything suspicious. It was five to eleven.
He climbed down from the roof onto the terrace, grabbed his jacket, in which the pistol lay heavily in a side pocket, and hurried down the stairs. He opened the front door a crack and peered out at the intersection one more time. There was no sign of the distinguished-looking gentleman.
Georg walked down Twenty-fourth Street and up the berm. The man was standing on the shore looking out on to the bay. Georg put his foot up on the berm, rested his elbow on his knee, and waited. After a while the man turned and looked back, saw Georg, and came up to him. As they stood facing each other Georg noticed that his tie was covered with a host of tiny white garden gnomes-standing, sitting, lying-all wearing pointed red hats.
“Shall we stay here?” the Russian said, eyeing Georg over the rimless spectacles perched on his nose. He looks like a professor, Georg thought.
“Yes, here’s fine,” Georg replied. He took his hand with the pistol out of his pocket. “May I?” He frisked the “professor,” who stood there shaking his head. Georg found no weapon.
“Doesn’t one do this sort of thing?” Georg asked with a smile. “I’m not up on the etiquette of this kind of meeting.” They sat down. “I’ve brought along the merchandise,” Georg continued, taking out the can with the negatives and giving them to the professor. “There are, altogether, fourteen rolls of film.”
The professor took the negatives out of the can and held them up to the sky. He slowly eyed one frame after another. Georg looked at the sailboats. When the professor was finished with the first roll, he handed it back without comment and Georg gave him the next. Two boats, one with red sails and one with blue, were racing past. A ship with an array of brightly colored containers on its deck came by, then a fast, gray warship. Georg kept handing him can after can. The sun glittered on the shivering waves.
“What price are you asking?” the professor inquired in a thin, high voice, pronouncing the words with a clipped British intonation.
“My party prices them at thirty million, and anything over twenty is mine. If it’s under twenty, I’ll have to check back with my party.”
The professor carefully rolled the last roll of film tighter and tighter, until it would have fit into the can five times. He slid it into the can and held it there with his finger. “Tell your party that we have been offered the same negatives for twelve million, and that we find even that price too high.” He let go of the roll, and it expanded to the confines of the can with a hiss.
Georg was struck dumb. What the professor had just said was unthinkable. What did it mean? What if it was true? What if it wasn’t? “I will inform my party. But I don’t see them believing that there is another offer-they will see that as a ploy on your part to lower the price.”
The professor smiled. “The matter is more complicated than you seem to realize. Were you to view the matter from our perspective, with the premise that the first seller does in fact exist, you will see that just as you have doubts about the existence of the first offer, we have reason to doubt the existence of a bona fide second offer that you are presenting. Not to put too fine a point on it, the crux of the matter not only hinges on the contingence you have surmised-that a potential buyer who has two offers might pitch them against each other-but a seller for his part can also influence the negotiations to his advantage by stepping up to the negotiating table, so to speak, and donning the garb of yet another seller.”
How could anyone formulate such sentences! The logic behind what the professor was saying was as immaculate as his grammar.
“Why don’t you simply decide what the designs are worth to you and name a price?” Georg said.
Now the professor laughed. “You must admit there is something ironic in the idea that someone like me should be called upon to explain the capitalist law of supply and demand and the connection between demand, price, and value. But let us shed light on another aspect of this matter. Let us suppose that you are requesting for your private use any moneys that exceed a sum that, as you inform us, your party sets at twenty million, but which, circumstances being what they are, should realistically be set at fifteen. And if we also take as a premise that you will not be able to count on our closing a deal with a sum beyond twenty-one million, as you yourself have, in a sense, intimated, then I put it to you that you are facing a personal profit in the range of one to six million dollars-a sum, I might add, that doubtless is far more manageable. Do you follow me?”
“It was hard to follow, but I find it’s worth the effort. I see you like balancing ‘ifs’ with ‘thens.’ Is that just in speaking, or in action as well?”
“Do you know the story of Alexander the Great and the Gordian knot?” the professor said.
“Why do you ask?”
“Well, in the Gordian fortress one day, Alexander the Great happened upon a great knot that no one had ever managed to unravel. The upshot was that Alexander simply took his sword and cut through the knot. Logic, you see, is a matter of unraveling chains of thought and meaning that in our everyday communication become tangled, and as the links in these chains are the ‘ifs’ and ‘thens,’ then this very game of ‘ifs’ and ‘thens’-as you have it-serves to unravel as opposed to cutting through such tangles. By extension, it also has as its focal point talking and thinking as opposed to acting. If you will allow me to point the moral of that story and regard it through the prism of you, me, our interested parties, and the merchandise in question, then our aforementioned deliberations place you in the role of Alexander the Great who is faced with the knot and the alternative of attempting, like so many prior visitors to the Gordian palace, to unravel it or simply cut through it with the swipe of his sword.”
“Those are your aforementioned deliberations, not mine.”
The professor had lifted the can, holding it between his index and middle fingers, and with his last words had dropped it into Georg’s open palm. The professor shrugged his shoulders. “My deliberations, our deliberations-by now, I would say, these deliberations have taken root in your mind too, and are consequently as much your deliberations as ours.”
“Do you know the other seller?” Georg asked.
“Do I know him?”
“Have you seen him, or spoken to him? Do you know who he is?”
The professor shook his head. “He didn’t leave a calling card, nor did he show us his passport.”
“Any hunches who he might be?”
“Ah, the breaking through the borders of knowledge by hunches-indeed, one could describe our trade in those very terms. We most definitely have hunches, and our hunches, like all hunches, would be worthless if we had nothing to base them on. If the issue at hand is that you are uncertain about the loyalty within your faction, then I would like to assure you that I understand your position. But as I am not responsible for garnering the hunches particular to this case, I can only say that I will make inquiries and inform myself of the current state of hunches.”