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  But the Society of Friends was different. It had no secret handshakes, no secret languages, no rituals of indoctrination, no masonic trappings. The Society, although profoundly secretive and jealous of its own anonymity, had gone beyond those forms of playacting. It promised more than fabulous wealth, it pledged a share in power, in shaping the destinies of countries like Cuba, sinking under the miserable weight of Communist mismanagement. The Society assured personal contact with history. It rendered senseless the notion that men were powerless before destiny. Some men, such as the members of the Society, could make an amazing difference. That they could make incalculable fortunes at the same time was not unattractive.

  Magiwara gazed through his glasses into the drizzly streets. He believed he had a great deal to contribute to the Society, some of whose members bore him a residual resentment for his race. Caporelli, for example, had always seemed vaguely indifferent to him, and the two Americans, whom he didn’t trust, treated him with the condescension of men who have eaten sushi once and, finding it deplorable, have condemned all of Japanese culture as being crude.

  Magiwara knew he’d overcome these obstacles in time. He’d never yet been defeated by a hurdle placed in his way. At the age of fifty-eight he had amassed a personal fortune of seventy-three million dollars. Membership in the Society of Friends would increase that sum a hundredfold. The legality of the Society’s business didn’t perplex him. He knew there were grey areas, under-explored by routine capitalists, in which creative men might construct profitable enterprises. Such as Cuba, he thought.

  He had studied the Society’s history, at least the little that had been made available to him in the archives, stored in a bank-vault in the Italian town of Bari. These documents provided a broad outline of the Society’s development, from the late nineteenth century when it had come into existence as a banking adjunct to the Mafia, laundering Sicilian money, investing it discreetly and legally, managing it as it grew. Through the 1920s and 30s, the Society, reorganising and naming itself for the first time The Society of Friends, a title whose ironic religious resonance escaped Magiwara, had seen the urgent need to move away from the violent excesses and the adverse publicity generated by men like Capone. The Society, far more secretive than the Mafia – which had become a public corporation, a soap opera, its innermost workings exposed for all and sundry to relish – now existed quite apart from the organisation that had spawned it. Few contemporary Mafiosi even knew of the Society’s existence. If they’d heard of it at all it was only as ancient history, an obscure group that had gone out of existence before the Second World War, having “lost” considerable sums of the Mafia’s money in “regrettable market trading”. In fact, the missing money had been embezzled cleanly by officers of the Society and now the Society owned banks and investment houses that had once belonged to the great financial barons of the West, managed funds, manipulated massive amounts of the currencies that flowed between the stock exchanges of different countries. It influenced prices on the world’s markets, funded anti-Communist movements in Central America, Asia, and Africa. It never avoided its fiscal responsibilities. Its various fronts – banks, financial houses, shipping companies – all paid taxes in the countries where they were located. Whenever difficulties arose, whenever there was a tax dispute, these disagreements were always somehow settled very quietly, man to man, banker to revenue officer, and the Society of Friends was never mentioned. It moved unobtrusively and swiftly like a great shark seeking the shadowy places where it might be glimpsed but never identified. Sinewy, elegant, contemptuous of weakness, indifferent to ethics, it was firmly entrenched in the structure of world capitalism. And Kenzaburo Magiwara was a part of this great organisation.

  He looked out of the limousine. Almost home. He laid his hands on his thighs, drummed his dainty fingers. There was a skeletal delicacy about his whole body, as if his skin were no more than one thin membranous layer stretched tightly across bone. The delicacy was more apparent than real. Magiwara was hard and acquisitive and ambitious. Apart from accumulating a personal fortune, he also owned two United States congressmen, a British Member of Parliament, a Christian Democrat in Italy, two members of the Austrian Nationalrat, and assorted police chiefs in European and Asian cities – all useful acquisitions.

  The big car slowed to a halt at a traffic signal. The rainy street was quiet, practically empty save for a small car, a black Dodge Colt that slowed alongside the limousine. Magiwara paid it no attention.

  The light changed from red to green. The limousine didn’t move. Magiwara leaned forward and tapped the smoked-glass partition separating him from the driver. There was no response. He pressed the button that rolled the partition down.

  It was the strangest thing. The driver wasn’t behind the wheel. Magiwara raised himself up, peered into the driving compartment, thinking that his driver had suffered something – a heart attack, say – and slithered to the floor. But he wasn’t anywhere in the vehicle.

  Puzzled, not panicked, Magiwara frowned. He was aware of the Dodge Colt alongside, which also hadn’t moved. A side window opened in the small car. Magiwara anticipated a face, but none appeared.

  The rolled-down window revealed only a darkness in which something metallic glinted. It took him only a moment to recognise the object. It was blunt, terrible, archaic, and he was seized by a sense of unreality, of some awful mistake being perpetrated here.

  The blast of the sawn-off shotgun rocked the limousine. It crashed through the glass and all Magiwara heard just before it blew his face away was the piercing sound of shaved air and eternity.

  6

  Norfolk, England

  Gunther Ruhr listened to the tiresome sound of a ping-pong ball clicking on the surface of a table. He rose from the narrow iron bed and went to the doorway of the living-room, on the far side of which two men were casually playing table tennis. Everything here irritated Ruhr, not just the noise of the ball but also this isolated house surrounded by mud and broken chicken coops and the bitter smell of dry rot that filled his nostrils night after night. A chill rain fell predictably every afternoon, but mainly what depressed him was the company he was obliged to keep.

  There were four men in all. They had taken part in Ruhr’s rescue from the English police, and he admired their reckless courage – but on a simple social level they tended to talk in single syllables, or when speech failed them, as it often did, they grunted. When you’d been stuck for days in a run-down farmhouse with no fellowship save the noise of the rain on the window and nothing to read but a mildewed Baedeker’s 1913 Handbook for Paris (the only volume he’d found in the whole house), you needed some kind of diversion.

  The two preening Argentinians, Flavell and Zapino, were dark-faced characters who spent a great deal of time running combs through their slick black hair. Now and again they’d congratulate themselves for the successful rescue of Ruhr, as if they were men at a school reunion remembering old pranks. When there was nothing to interest them on the old black and white TV, they dismantled weapons and cleaned them. They looked like contented lovers at such times. Yesterday morning Flavell had accidentally discharged a pistol, firing it into the ceiling and causing great consternation.

  The other pair, the ping-pong players, were the Americans, one a cadaverous man called Trevaskis (the most articulate of the four; no great compliment), the other a pale white giant known, rather ordinarily, as Rick. The Americans kept to themselves, conversing in a form of English that Ruhr found hard to follow. Street patois, slang, mangled words. Trevaskis, who was all bone, and whose eyes shone with a missionary fervour, looked across the room at Gunther Ruhr.

  There was contempt in the look. It was an expression Ruhr inspired in many people, one he’d seen all his life. People tended to step away from him, as if they intuited some terrible quality in him, a thing both lifeless and contagious. When they were too stubborn to move, they gazed just as Trevaskis was doing now, trying to stare down the demon. It amused the German. He sometimes
thought of himself as a prism in which other people might glimpse a blackly intimidating aspect of the human condition.

  Trevaskis, something of a joker, said, “Sleep well, Mr Claw?”

  The giant Rick, dressed in white T-shirt and blue jeans, smiled. He smiled at everything Trevaskis said. The two Argentinians put their combs away and turned to look. Ruhr remained in the doorway, folding his arms across his chest. The Claw. He neither liked nor disliked his nickname. It had been created by the press, merchants who traded in revulsion.

  The same press had bestowed the status of legend on him, and he was pleased by that. He kept clippings under the floorboards of the tiny attic apartment he secretly maintained in the Sachsenhausen area of Munich. These invariably referred to his lack of moral values and his coldness toward human suffering. He was called barbarous, a monster. He sometimes leafed through the cuttings and felt removed from these descriptions. They missed the point. It wasn’t so much his lack of certain qualities, it was more the fact that he considered ordinary human virtues undesirable. Everybody wanted love and affection: therefore they were commonplace and debased. Everybody deplored needless violence: therefore it was acceptable. Ruhr’s logic was based on perversity. What other men might strive for, Ruhr wanted to destroy. What some men might exalt, Ruhr ridiculed. The sea of his feelings ran contrary to any common tide. Even his physical deformity, which he liked because he thought it mirrored the inner Ruhr, separated him from other people. He was alone in the world. He’d never felt any other way.

  Ruhr stepped into the living-room. He raised the perfect hand to his face, stroked the firm jaw. An intriguing aspect of the recent misadventure in Cambridge was that suddenly, after years of anonymity, he had recognisable features! He was a public figure whose photograph had been printed in newspapers all over the world! His face was almost as well known as that of any movie star, which was not an altogether unpleasant novelty. He liked it the way any actor, formerly obliged to perform as a masked character, might enjoy recognition after years of doing his best work in the shadows.

  He caught the ping-pong ball in mid-air and closed his left hand around it. “We have work to do. Tomorrow is the day.”

  The four men were silent. They watched Ruhr closely. They were more than his rescuers, more than the soldiers in his command, they were also his guards, instructed by the Cuban to keep him from harm, to limit his movements and make sure he didn’t repeat the disastrous business in Cambridge. Ruhr had nothing but disdain for the men who bought his services. He had no sense of being an employee. Instead he considered himself the master of those who hired him. Nor did he ever trust the men who paid him because they were usually slaves of one ideology or another, lackeys to this obsession or that. They seldom had themselves under control; consequently, they were unable to control anything around them.

  The Cuban, for example: Ruhr no more trusted him than he believed in God. You could see all the Cuban’s wretched ambition in his eyes, in every word he spoke, every gesture he made. He’d come here two days ago, breathing fire, warning Ruhr not to screw things up, trying to hide the fact he was afraid because his aspirations were menaced, and Ruhr had played the obedient little dog with a theatrical contrition the Cuban, wrapped up in his own aims, apparently missed. Yessir, yessir. I’ll be good, sir.

  What the Cuban did not know was that Gunther Ruhr always took precautions for his own safety; documents, papers, numbers of bank accounts, copies of cashier’s cheques, diaries describing assignments and naming names – these were in sealed boxes in the possession of a certain Herr Wilhelm Schiller, a lawyer in Hamburg, who had instructions to open them only in the event of Ruhr’s death or disappearance. Ruhr believed in protecting himself.

  Now the four men were watching over him, sentries circling the cage of an unpredictable madman. Ruhr was thrilled by the idea of creating tension in other people.

  “Get the map,” he said.

  The Argentinians produced a detailed Ordnance Survey map. Ruhr spread it on the table. He had an amazing memory, a mind that seized the essential details of anything and stored them for instant recall at any future date. He had studied this map once and he didn’t need to look at it again for his own sake. He was rehearsing the others.

  He pointed to a minor road that ran between woodlands. There was a windmill to the east, a canal in the west. A mile past the windmill was the crucial fork in the road. A thin pathway ran in one direction toward a dairy farm; the other tine, smooth and concrete, sliced through more woodland, lovely and dense and unfenced, affording marvellous opportunities for concealment and surprise. Here and there on the map were villages and hamlets. The only village of interest, Ruhr said, was the one known as St Giles. Six miles beyond it was the airfield of the East Anglia Flying Club. This was the most crucial location in the whole operation. If Ruhr and his men were somehow prevented from reaching the airfield, they would separate. If they were not already dead, Ruhr added, and smiled in his usual thin way, the expression of a man whose sense of humour, misunderstood by all, had doomed him to a life of smiling alone.

  The Argentinians asked questions about time. They both wore very expensive watches and they believed that these instruments had to be “seenchronised”. Ruhr told them that time was his own business, something he kept to himself for security reasons. The South Americans understood and became silent.

  Ruhr folded the map. He went inside the kitchen. Eggshells, bacon rinds, twisted pieces of cellophane, matches, cigarette butts, open jars of meat paste – trash everywhere. Ruhr filled a glass with water, drank slowly. He didn’t like the chaos in this room. He preferred a world of clean angles and well-defined spaces. But it wasn’t always possible to live in such a perfect universe. All too often there were intrusions, such as this kitchen and its dirty disorder.

  Or the girl in Cambridge …

  He remembered her unsunned thighs and the way she’d shivered when she’d taken her jeans off and how she’d drawn a thin curtain across the window, trying to look provocative but succeeding only in appearing pathetic. And then the expression on her face when the steel gleamed on his hand – she’d screamed, and after that came the chaos and ignominy of capture.

  He remembered the policeman called Pagan who had asked all kinds of questions. Ruhr had made up stories, weaving them off the top of his head. Like any good storyteller, he believed in his fictions. He was a salesman with a line in time-share condominiums, an absent-minded Egyptologist on a backpacking vacation, an urbane professor of Swiss Literature (a part-time occupation, you understand, he’d said to an unsmiling Pagan) – identities, some of them amusing to him, flooded Ruhr as fast as he could assume them.

  Pagan refused to be entertained by the ever-changing cast of characters. He’d been demanding. Frustrated, he’d thump his fist on the table in the interview room. At other moments he tried to disguise his irritation by falling silent and looking directly into Ruhr’s eyes. The Englishman had determined grey eyes, but Ruhr had met their challenge without flinching. And now the English cop was wounded, or so the TV news had said. Lying in a hospital bed, Ruhr thought, frustrated and angry and desperate. A man like that could be extremely dangerous if he were out on the streets. A man like that wasn’t likely to be confined too long to a hospital.

  But he had the measure of Pagan; he was confident of that. Pagan was dogged, but clearly not inspired. In a contest between himself and the Englishman, his own superiority would triumph every time. Pagan had intuitions, of course, but they would be dull compared to Ruhr’s own. Ruhr could slip in and out of other souls; Frank Pagan, at best, could only hope to read – by means of emotional braille – other people’s behaviour and through this slight empathy predict their future actions. Guesswork! Ruhr had no affinity with anything so unreliable. He put his credence only in certainty, and the supreme certainty was his faith in himself.

  Ruhr raised his glass to his lips. The memory of the girl was still strong. She hadn’t been beautiful, perhaps not even pretty, but
Ruhr didn’t care about ordinary beauty. Her paleness, her fragility, glass to be shattered – that was what had attracted him. But then he’d become blinded by his need to put the deformed hand inside her and twist it upward into her womb, and hear flesh come away, that soft whimpering sound of skin and sinew torn and muscle cut. Usually the girls fainted. Sometimes they bled to death. At such times it seemed to Ruhr that he wasn’t entirely involved in these acts, that he stood outside himself, hypnotised by his own need to dominate and hurt, entranced by the simplicity, the purity, of power. There was another factor too, and that was his curiosity about the female anatomy: the way it worked, the intricate arrangement of womb and tubes, a fascination that had begun when he’d first seen a medical text at the age of eight and glimpsed, in a rose-coloured sectional diagram, the soft pink secrets of the female interior, and its essential vulnerability. The sight of it aroused a perplexing hunger inside the young boy Ruhr had been, and he’d never forgotten those detailed sketches. For a time he had toyed with the notion of becoming a doctor, perhaps a gynaecologist, but the idea had lost its intrigue, vanquished by Ruhr’s preference for destruction over restoration.

  Now what troubled him was to have been caught in Cambridge so stupidly! Was it slackness? Was he too old at thirty-seven to be as cautious, as vigilant, as he’d always been? Why hadn’t he clamped a hand round the girl’s mouth and silenced her? Was he becoming simply blasé, arrogant to the point of indifference? Or had it come down to something else: the idea of creating a contest for himself, his own brilliance matched against another mind, a protagonist – Frank Pagan, for example? Was Pagan even worthy of that consideration?

  Trevaskis came into the kitchen. “It’s cold, Ruhr. The guys want permission to light a fire.”

  “No fire,” Ruhr said. He disliked Trevaskis. The other men were acquiescent, but Trevaskis had an independent streak that was going to prove troublesome in the end. The American would have to be watched over. “What would happen if somebody saw smoke from the chimney? Perhaps you would rather go up on the roof and wave a big red flag?”