Hot Sky at Midnight

seeming to. The man sitting three tables behind us, facing in my direction. You’ll know which one I mean.”

She did exactly as she was told. Enron followed her with his eyes, watching the slow, undulating movements of her, the swaying of her hips, the ripplings of her great meaty buttocks. As she passed the Hungarian, she reacted only in the most momentary way, a quick tightening of her step and a brief sharp backward quiver of her elbows, as though a mild electrical shock had passed through her. Eyes less acute than Enron’s might not have noticed the response at all. Then she moved on, her loose gown floating grandly about her, and disappeared on the far side of the courtyard.

On the way back she stole another look, flicking a glance at the side of the Hungarian’s face as she went past him. She was wide-awake now, eyes bright, breathing hard, nostrils flaring. Excited, yes.

“Fascinating,” she said, taking her seat. “I’ve never seen a face like that.”

“I have.”

“You know him?”

“I’ve had some contact with him. Long ago.”

“An astounding face. I’d like to sculpt it, in clay. To run my hands over him and feel the bony structure underneath. Who is he, Marty?”

“A man named Farkas. George Farkas, Laszlo Farkas, Alexander Farkas—I forget the first name. Hungarian. They have about six first names in the whole country, Hungarians. If they aren’t Georges, they’re Laszlos or Alexanders. Or Zoltans. He works for Kyocera-Merck. Victor Farkas, that’s the name. Victor. The exception that proves the rule.”

“How do you know him?” Jolanda asked.

“I met him once. It was in—I don’t remember, Bolivia, Venezuela, some incredibly hot place that was all jungles and vines and palm trees, a place where you would sprout green moss on your skin if you stood still for five minutes. He is in my line of work, this Farkas.”

“A journalist?”

“A spy. His title with Kyocera-Merck is ‘expediter.’ My title with my employer is ‘journalist.’ We do the same sort of thing, Farkas and I, but he does it for Kyocera-Merck and I do it for the government of Israel.”

“I thought you worked for Cosmos magazine.”

He took her hand in his again. She has magnificent breasts, he thought, but she is really stupid. Perhaps there is a connection. She is a cow not just metaphorically, but a real one, a literal cow. She has been retrofitted with bovine genes to give her those splendid udders.

Quietly Enron said, “I thought I had told you all of this already and that you had understood it. The magazine work is my cover, Jolanda. I truly am a spy. That is what I do, actually, when I pretend to be a journalist. Is that clear enough? Are you willing to believe it? This was a matter that I thought was settled the night I was at your house.”

“I decided the next morning that you had only been joking.”

“A spy. Truly. When you told me about your friends in Los Angeles, the reason why I asked you to come up here with me and introduce me to them was that I saw a way that doing so would benefit my country. Not my magazine, but my country. I work for the state of Israel. Is that difficult for you to believe? When I left you that night, I called someone in Jerusalem on a secret scrambled line, I used code names and code words, I told them in spy language where I wanted to go and why I wanted to go there, and tickets for this trip were made available to me through special channels. And visas for us both. Do you think it is always so easy to get an entry visa to a place like this? But I did it in one night, because my government made the proper connections for me. I tell you this because I would not want you to be deceived about me in any way. I may seem sometimes like a bastard, but I am an honorable man, Jolanda.”

“The other night, when I said I had never slept with a spy before, you said that you were one. You said it just like that. I believed you and then afterward I didn’t. And now you’re saying it again.”

“If you want to believe I am a writer for a magazine, Jolanda, believe that instead. Believe whatever makes you happiest.”

Enron saw that she was going to go back and forth on the issue in what passed for her mind forever. Which was fine with him. If she were ever interrogated, she would provide her questioners with a torrent of ingenuous ambivalence. Sometimes telling people the simple truth about yourself is the best way of surrounding the reality of your profession with a haze of confusion.

She said, “The man without eyes. How can he be a spy, if he can’t see?”

“He can see, all right. He just doesn’t do it the way we do.”

“He uses extrasensory perception, you mean?”

“It is something like that, yes.”

“Was he born that way?”

“Yes and no,” Enron said.

“I don’t understand,” said Jolanda. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“A splice job was done on him while he was in the womb. I don’t know who did it, or why. The time we met, it didn’t seem appropriate to ask him about it.” Enron allowed himself a quick glance in Farkas’s direction. Farkas was busy with his dinner. He seemed calm, relaxed, concentrating entirely on his meal. If he had noticed Enron’s presence, he was giving no indication of it. Enron said, “He is a very difficult man, very intelligent, very dangerous. I wonder what he is doing here. —You find his face fascinating, you say?”

“Very.”

“You want to sculpt it? You want to run your hands over his bony structure?”

“Yes. I really do.”

“Ah,” Enron said. “Well, then. Let us find a way of arranging for that to be possible, shall we?”

15

toward sunset carpenter left Hitchcock in charge of the trawler and went over to the Calamari Maru in the sleek little silvery kayak that they used as the ship’s boat. He took Rennett with him.

The stink of the other ship reached his nostrils long before he went scrambling up the gleaming woven- monofilament ladder that they threw over the side for him: a bitter, acrid reek, a miasma so dense that it was almost visible. Breathing it was something like inhaling all of Cleveland at a single snort Carpenter wished he’d worn a face-lung. But who expected to need one out at sea, where you were supposed to be able to breathe reasonably decent air?

He wouldn’t have been surprised to discover that the smell was coming from the Calamari Maru’s own bones and tissues, that its hull and deck and superstructure and everything else were covered with rotting loathsome pustules bubbling with decay. But in fact there seemed nothing much wrong with the ship aside from general neglect and slovenliness: black stains on the deck, gray swirls of dust everywhere, some nasty rust-colored patches of ozone attack that needed work. The reek came from the squid themselves.

The heart of the ship was a vast tank, a huge squid-peeling factory occupying the whole mid-deck. Carpenter had seen ships like this one at anchor in the Port of Oakland— Samurai Industries ran dozens of them —but he had never thought much about what it would be like actually to be aboard one.

Looking down into the tank, he saw a nightmare world of marine life, battalions of hefty many-tentacled squid swimming in herds, big-eyed pearly boneless phantoms, scores of them shifting direction suddenly and simultaneously in their squiddy way. Glittering mechanical flails moved among them, seizing and slicing, efficiently locating and cutting out the nerve tissue, flushing the edible remainder toward the meat-packing facility at the far end of the tank. The stench was astonishing. The whole thing was a tremendous processing machine. With the onetime farming heartland of North America and temperate Europe now worthless desert, and the world dependent on the thin, rocky soil of northern Canada and Siberia for so much of its food, harvesting the sea was essential. Carpenter understood that. But he hadn’t expected a squid ship to smell so awful. He fought to keep from gagging.

“You get used to it,” said the woman who greeted him when he clambered aboard. “Five minutes, you won’t