Hot Sky at Midnight

“Good point,” said Enron grudgingly. “All right. If you’ll excuse me, Victor. I’ll be right back.”

He took the call in a shielded cubicle to the rear of the restaurant. But the face that came onto the visor was not the brutal, massive one of Mike Davidov. Enron found himself looking once again at the softer, fleshier features of the courier Kluge. He seemed agitated.

“Well?”

“He’s gone. Your Los Angeles person.”

“You mean Dudley Reynolds? Gone where?”

“Back to Earth,” Kluge said. His voice was hoarse with shame. “They fucked us up. He never was in that hotel in Santiago. They checked in there, and then they left and went straight to the terminal and caught the shuttle to Earth under four entirely new names. Those bastards must have a suitcase full of passports.”

“Mother of Mohammed,” Enron said. “Here and gone. Just like that.”

“Very slippery people.”

“Yes,” Enron said. “Very slippery.” His respect for Davidov had gone up a couple of notches. Davidov must be no ordinary freebooting thug, if he could dance his way through Valparaiso Nuevo so artfully, eluding even a clever boy like Kluge—doing his business here, concluding the preliminaries of his little insurrection, and getting out of here right under Kluge’s nose.

Enron wondered whether Davidov had had a meeting with Victor Farkas while he was here. But he saw no immediate way of finding that out from Farkas without divulging information to him that he was not yet ready to share. There might be other ways, though.

“Is there anything else you want me to do?” Kluge asked.

“Not right now. No. Yes: one thing. Can you put together Davidov’s path through Valparaiso Nuevo in any more detail than you’ve given it to me? All I know is that he was in this hotel for a while and then he supposedly went to another one under a different name and now he’s on his way back to Earth. Can you discover how long he was here and who he saw? Particularly I want to know if he had any contact with the man without eyes. You know. Farkas.”

“I’ll get right on it,” Kluge said. “I can try to run a reverse trace, all his moves backward from today.”

“Good. Good. You get right on it, yes.”

Enron was flaming with annoyance and frustration as he returned to the table. To have come all the way up here for nothing—well, not entirely nothing, at least he had encountered Farkas and through him had begun to link Kyocera with the uprising against the Generalissimo. That was still mostly conjecture, though. And now, assuming he cared to pursue any of this, he would have to try to hunt Davidov down in Los Angeles. Damn. Damn.

It took all his considerable self-discipline to get himself calm. Then, as he approached the table, Enron saw from the exchange of body language that was going on between Jolanda and Farkas that something flirtatious had been taking place in his absence, and he was furious all over again.

Farkas, who had been leaning toward Jolanda in an obviously affectionate manner, returned quickly and smoothly to his upright position while Enron was still twenty paces to the rear of the table. Interesting, Enron thought. Eyes in the back of his head. Jolanda had picked up some sort of signal from Farkas’s withdrawal that Enron was returning, and she too had straightened up, but she had no way of swiftly repairing the way she looked: her face was flushed, her eyes were glowing. The good old hot blast of arousal was coming out of every pore of her. That irritated Enron, but also it excited his competitive lust. Let Farkas make time with her behind my back, he thought. But he will never touch her again. Whereas when we get back to the hotel this evening, I will fuck her as she has never been fucked before.

“You look upset,” Jolanda said. “Bad news?”

“Of a sort, yes. It was a message from Dudley. His father is very ill and he’s returning to Earth at once. So we won’t be able to have lunch with him tomorrow.”

“That’s too bad.”

“It certainly is. Such a sweet person—I feel very sad for him. We’ll have to call him as soon as we get back to Earth ourselves, won’t we?”

“Absolutely,” Jolanda said.

As Enron took his seat, Farkas rose, smiling. “Pardon me, please. I will be back very soon.”

Enron watched him cross the room, wondering if Farkas had somehow deciphered the inner meaning of what he had just said and was on his way to make some telephone call of his own. But no, no, the eyeless man was simply going to the bathroom.

Turning to Jolanda, Enron said, “He’s up to his neck in this thing, I’m certain of it. He’s here to set things up for Kyocera as the behind-the-scenes muscle for your friend’s operation. There’s no doubt about that.”

“He thinks you’re here to do the same thing for Israel,” Jolanda said.

What a wild notion that was! Enron’s eyes widened. The woman was extraordinary. Her mind constantly went darting off with hummingbird velocity into the strangest places.

The unsettling thought that she might just be right came to him, though.

“Did he tell you that while I was on the phone?” Enron asked uneasily.

“No, of course not. But I could see him thinking it. He’s as convinced that Israel is the secret backer as you are that Kyocera is.”

He felt immense relief, It was all just her muddleheaded speculation, then.

“Well, he’s wrong,” Enron said.

“What if you both are? What if there is no secret backer?”

“You know nothing about these things,” said Enron, irritated now by this.

“Right,” Jolanda said. “I am a stupid cow and that’s all. You admire me only for my tits.”

“Please, Jolanda.”

“I have very fine tits, I agree. Many men have told me that and I wouldn’t dream of disagreeing with them. But there’s more to me than that, believe me, Marty. If you’re lucky you may find that out.”

“You misunderstand me. I have the highest respect for—”

“Yes. I’m sure you do.”

Jolanda glanced past Enron’s shoulder. Farkas had reappeared, now, and loomed above him.

“About dinner,” Farkas said genially, as he resumed his place at the table. “As I said, I have eaten here very often. If you will permit me to recommend one or two things—”

20

it was raining cats and dogs as the Tonopah Maru came into San Francisco Bay, towing its iceberg behind it. How appropriate, Carpenter thought, that the first rain in God only knew how many months should be falling with crazy superabundance on San Francisco on the very day that the trawler showed up with this huge addition to the local water supply.

The weather had been cruelly cloudless the entire second half of the voyage home, no sign of the usual, even ubiquitous, masses of water vapor that congested and whitened the sky nearly all of the time in most parts of the world. That was one of the greenhouse effects, the increase in atmospheric water vapor, which helpfully served to amplify the relatively small basic warming impulse that the CO₂ and other greenhouse gases caused. But, for some inexplicable reason, day after day out at sea the sky above the Tonopah Maru had been immaculate and the sun had beaten with unrestrained fury against the berg. Which had, mirror-dusted though it was, given up much of its substance to the sea under the daily solar barrage.

Still, there was plenty of it left for San Francisco. And here they were at journey’s end, chugging under the venerable Golden Gate Bridge with something like seventeen or eighteen hundred kilotons of the Antarctic ice cap in tow, heading into a dark squally afternoon, torrents and torrents of H₂O dropping with lunatic irascibility upon the city by the bay.

“Will you look at that,” Hitchcock said, standing on deck next to Carpenter in the drenching downpour. “Actual fucking rain.”

“Beautiful,” Carpenter said. “Gorgeous.”

It wasn’t, not really. The rain was raising clouds of ambient filth from the city streets, lifting the accretions