The Devil's Game Read online

  To Bill Broxon

  in memoriam

  THE DEVIL’S GAME

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1980 by Poul Anderson

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Book

  Baen Enterprises

  260 Fifth Avenue

  New York, N.Y. 10001

  First Baen printing: November 1985

  ISBN: 0-671-55995-8

  Cover art by Stephen Hickman

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by

  SIMON & SCHUSTER

  MASS MERCHANDISE SALES COMPANY

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, N.Y. 10020

  SAMAEL

  The shadow whispered.

  It should not have been there at all, in this room which was half antique grace and half modern steel and electronics. Blinds, drawn against noonday, quelled and scattered light, filling space with ocherous dusk. The old man was not even sure if dimness deepened toward darkness in the corner he faced, or if it was a trick of old eyes or old brain. Nor could he quite tell whether he heard a real voice, or a modulation of the murmur from the air conditioner, or a stirring inside his head. Throughout the years with Samael, and they were now many, he had never known.

  “You are ready,” it seemed to tell rather than ask him.

  Sunderland Haverner nodded. An ache jabbed through him at the motion, reminding of how tense he was. That always happened at first when Samael returned, and went on in lesser degree for the whole time that Samael remained.

  “Yes,” he said. “In fact, more than ready. I have had to delay matters, waiting for you.”

  His own words sounded unnaturally loud and as though, impossibly, they echoed. Silence lay heavier on the island than ever at midnight. Among its dwellers went stories about ghosts and other creatures who walk through the sleeping hours of the day.

  “Explain.”

  Haverner frowned, then shrugged. Often Samael’s demands made no human kind of sense. Why need he spell out the obvious? Well, just as often the questions, comments, or commands that were omitted had been just as curious. Haverner had long since given up trying to understand Samael. He had—very nearly—given up fearing Samael.

  “The preliminaries took months, as I warned they would,” he answered. “Several detective agencies had to search in several different places, especially since you wanted … ah … ‘a broad distribution of types.’ Once found, prospective candidates must be investigated in depth and the unsuitable weeded out.” He let a somewhat spastic chuckle break from him. “Incidentally, a number of problems and little crises arose along the way. It was not precisely simple for me to conceal the purpose of this expensive effort from men whose profession it is to snoop, especially when I had to work from a distance through two or three sets of intermediaries. Would you like to hear the story?”

  “No. It is clear that you coped; it was clear from the beginning that you would. Proceed.”

  Haverner sighed. “The rest should be, too. I still had a good many reports to study. Since you weren’t here [and no use wondering where Samael had been, or why, or if perhaps Samael had been present unbeknownst to him], I had to choose the seven as best I could to match your specifications. Thereafter the subjects must be approached and convinced, and arrangements made to bring them—and when everything was ready and still you hadn’t arrived, I had to give diem a plausible excuse for the delay.”

  Weariness dragged him down against the chaise longue where he sat. Surely Samael could have waited to appear until an old man had had his siesta. He resisted, squared his shoulders, forced business into his tone. “I did get them to stand by, and it hasn’t been so long that any are likely to have changed their minds or made conflicting commitments. We can doubtless have them here within a few days.”

  “We will now examine their dossiers,” rustled from the shadow.

  Did it glide out of its corner, across wall and bookshelves and desk, to hover at his back? Did it look through his eyes, or did Samael have sense organs not manifest in that shadow?

  Haverner’s hand, gnarly, liver-spotted, not altogether steady, reached for a binder that lay on the desk beside him. It was full to its limit with sheets of typescript, so that it pulled hard in his weak grasp and he was glad to let it fall onto the blanket covering his lap. His heart began to flutter and he needed a moment before he could open the volume. Meanwhile he wondered vaguely if Samael felt carnivore eagerness, or abided in emotionless patience, or if either of those ideas meant anything where Samael was concerned.

  He flipped back the front cover. The first few pages were merely letters of transmittal from his agents, but he scanned them through his horn-rimmed reading glasses because he had received no order not to do so. The interesting part began at a synoptic list of the persons he had selected.

  Why had Samael spoken of “broad distribution” and then required that all but one be Yanquis? Could it have something to do with Haverner’s own origins? As it happened, the only native of these parts came alphabetically first:

  Orestes Cruz. 25. Ciudad Vizcaya. Born in back country of Santa Ana. Unmarried. Associated with previous government as driver of Colonel Ybarra with rank of sergeant. Arrested last year after overthrow of that government, on suspicion (justified) of connections more subversive than this.

  Matthew Aloysius Flagler. 40. Ciudad Vizcaya. Born in Chicago. Married, four children. Reform school and two prison terms in U.S.A. Manager of Casino Flores for four years until the former government closed down such operations; has since been living hand to mouth.

  Ellis Erik Nordberg. 47. Minneapolis, Minnesota. Born (as Elias Erik Nordberg) on a farm in South Dakota. Married, two children. Former Army officer, brevetted major at time of discharge, 1960. Founder and owner of Northmount Electronics, a small subcontracting manufacturer.

  Julia April Fern Petrie. 33. Braidwood, Long Island, New York. Born in Arizona. Former psychiatric nurse. Married (to an attorney), one child. At present has no paid employment because of child’s illness.

  Lauritz Willem Rance (always called Larry). 35. Richmond, California. Born in Los Angeles. Unmarried, two divorces, one child. Air Force service, 1963—65, followed by engineering degree, 1969. Lost several good positions and presently lives by odd jobs.

  Byron Latimer Shaddock. 28. New York City. Born in Annapolis, Maryland. Unmarried. B.A., prelaw. Harvard, 1973. His inherited wealth makes employment unnecessary, but he is active in various cultural and humanitarian organizations as well as in sports.

  Gayle Jeanine Matlock Robertson Thayer. 26. San Francisco, California. Born (as Gail Jeanine Matlock) in Chillicothe, Ohio. Married but separated, one prior divorce, no children. High school education only. Has been living by a succession of jobs, chiefly as a waitress when not on unemployment compensation.

  Haverner paused. “The photographs are attached to the individual reports,” he said.

  “Goon.”

  “But this is such a huge lot of material. I… am too tired. Let me rest till evening, and, yes, let half of it wait till tomorrow. Unless you want to kill me.”

  “You are more tough than that, Sunderland Haverner.” He barely heard, or thought he heard, laughter. “But be it as you request. I will come to you at nine, and we shall see how toughly you waited.”

  And he knew he was alone.

  His head and eyelids drooped. Abruptly they snapped back up. Breath gusted in between his lips. Damnation, the next hours were indeed going to be hard!

  Had he not suf
fered through enough postponement? He wanted Samael’s game to start as much as he had ever wanted anything. Or was that true? At this age, memories themselves were gliding, whispering shadows.

  Certain was, that at that age this was the final chance to play God.

  Or play Satan. If there was a difference.

  Unless his partner could and would prolong his existence, renew his youth—unlikely. The world was full of people who would gladly make the bargain that Haverner had made. How many of them were already partners of Samael?

  Regardless, he must sleep, or else he would be unfit to continue at eventide. With the discipline of a lifetime, Haverner settled back and closed his eyes again. Noonday stillness became total, until somewhere afar a dog howled.

  THE ISLAND

  Who remembers the empire that England lost generations before gaining the empire that Britain lost so lately?

  Perhaps “empire” is too strong a word. Along the whole Caribbean littoral and up into the Gulf of Mexico stretched this forgotten aspect of kingdom. It had almost nothing to do with the sugar islands of the Main, and was little known in London even when it was at its full. But for two hundred years and more these hot and musky coasts were speckled with enclaves of English-speaking men who sought not precious metals but precious trees.

  Here was a cedar walk and there a mahogany works. Beyond that headland and on this bayshore were stands of rosewood. Past yonder bend grew logwood; when indigo meant blue dye, logwood meant red. In towns that never became cities, black men wielded broadaxes side by side with white, and Indians who learned broken English instead of Spanish went (when they went) not to a Catholic but to a Protestant church.

  A strange sail in the sea, the Dons attack, the English hide in the woods. A strange smoke on the coast, the English attack, the Dons flee to the hills. At length someone in London unrolls a map, raises eyebrows, looks in ledgers, shrugs, rolls up the map; someone in Madrid signs a paper, takes snuff, shoves a document into a pigeonhole. Flags come down. Flags go up. Campeche is lost (recovered). The Mosquito Coast is redeemed (abandoned). Jamaica is safe for the Protestant Succession and six percent on ’Change. The banners of Iberia and Iberia’s children (what is a republic, Señor?) fly forever over Bluefields, Providence, Darien, over Utilla and Roatan and San Andres and Braggman’s Bluff and Bonacca. The Isle of Tanoa becomes La Isla Tanoa.

  Centuries erode the antique English tongue of the dwellers, but never wipe it out. “The Spaniard” rules the mainland and Britannia no longer rules the waves; the Tanoans are no longer British and never so much as consider becoming Spanish. What are they? They are Islandmen. They fish. They smuggle. They ’list under flags—any flags—and man merchant ships into foreign seas—any seas. When they have made their “enough” they return to Tanoa and either repair their fathers’ (uncles’, brothers’) houses or tear them down and build new ones. They fish. They smuggle. They watch the sky, the beach, the tides, and care nothing for any man not an Islandman.

  Tanoa is their world, a world clearly created by God for the Islandmen, the English language, and the old-style Methodist religion. (In England they had been “Independents,” and, in another sense, they still are.) This territory is not quite fifteen miles long, a trifle over seven miles wide at its greatest breadth. At the North End (“de Nart’ Ind”) are the Peak and the Crag. Offshore are the Iron Shoals. Around the Bight (“de Boyt”) are the Iron Cliffs. A few orchards and groves, pastures and truck gardens may be seen in the Fields: low hills and glades bearing Biblical names. “He haves a ’tater patch in Bet’lehem and a cow pasture in Gilead. No vun goes to any of dese places noight. Dere be’s sperrits in de voods.” No, everybody is at home then, and home is the North Port.

  Below these regions you find the Creek, and later the Bog, some miles of it, planted, where planted at all, in coconut trees. Offshore here are occasional turtle nets. At last you come to the South End, mangrove swamps and mangrove “bluffs,” the latter small upthrusts of land above the muddy water.

  And thus you reach a clear channel, across which you can make out the Caye. This is actually divided into several parts, fairy tale islets, two of them joined by a causeway to form the only other hamlet on Tanoa—scoffed at by the sophisticated North Enders. Elsewhere are other cayes, better known if not more frequented by Islandmen: Waterless Monday, the Serpent Church, Got No Bottom, Gehinnom.

  As for “de Sponyard”—represented by six squat, sullen mestizo soldiers in exile—he never goes to them. On clear days he can see the dim blue edge of the mainland. On overcast days he can see a gloom where his country must be. Sometimes it rains.

  INTRODUCTIONS

  The hog plum tree has been unfortunately named.

  Islandmen are in the habit not of feeding the fruit to their swine, of which they have a few, but of eating it themselves— green, as they do all local fruit, “else de vurms gits dem.” Hog plums are thumb-sized, pale orange to yellow in color, with a thin skin and a stone. The flesh when ripe is sweet and succulent, contended for by birds, ants, and, yes, worms.

  The seven who sat just before a particular hog plum tree at the shady west end of a patio behind the big white house had no traditions regarding it. The larger woman, Julia Petrie, turned a fruit over and over in one hand as though it were a feeling-piece, perhaps a jewel, solid throughout. Gayle Thayer held one very tentatively in her palm and looked at it as if it were so alien that anything might be expected of it: a kiss, maybe, a message of some sort, or even a small explosion. Of the men, Byron Shaddock had taken a sample, smiled to register absent-minded enjoyment and refocused his whole attention on the speaker. Lauritz—Larry—Rance had a plum raised to his lips, licked at a hair-thin crack, now and then applied the slightest pressure and licked again. Orestes Cruz had already eaten three; the pits lay at his feet, not wholly gnawed, and whenever a vivi ant came scurrying up to them a heel descended on it. Ellis Nordberg and Matthew Flagler sat beneath the tree as if it had never existed.

  Slim rattan seats had been given all of them, but Sunderland Haverner was in a sort of Morris chair made of unstained mahogany and lined with an Indio blanket from the Picos Lindos, the distant mainland mountains. Old blood runs cold, and, while the air was tropical, touched by jasmine and roses, a salt breeze drifted off eastward waters. No matter their sweat, the seven newcomers also looked, in their seven different ways, as if they felt scant warmth.

  “The sum in question,” Haverner was saying in a high but precise tone, “is a most traditional figure. The means of getting it are not in the least traditional. However, the sum in question is not really in question.” This seemed to amuse him a little. “One million United States dollars, on which the tax is one dollar per annum, payable to the Republic of Santa Ana. ” His lips parted in a brief, withered smile as he nodded. That gesture traveled west across the highlands and the sea beyond them, to the capital city from which the seven had flown this morning in an airplane of his and mostly in wary silence.

  “Two weeks or less from tomorrow,” he went on after a moment, “the winners of the game you are going to play will sign certain papers which make this arrangement perfectly legal in both nations, and elsewhere for that matter. Or, of course, there may be only a single signature, if there has been a single winner. However many or few, they divide the prize equally. My staff will help in arranging any desired discretion. 1 urge you to take advantage of this, knowing from long experience what nuisances—even dangers—swarm around one whose sudden good fortune becomes widely known.”

  The fruit she had been handling popped between Julia Petrie’s fingers. “Get to the point!” broke from her. Eyes swung in that direction. Haverner raised his brows. She swallowed, glanced away, then back again at him. “I’m sorry.” Her tone ran down from shrillness to a near mumble. “But please.”

  Still Haverner waited. Did he smile anew? It was hard to tell in this play of shade and sun-flecks against light whose intensity drained color from the sky itself. The breeze rattled leaves.
Cruising up from the beach, a gull mewed.

  Julia straightened her shoulders. “Well, look, Mr., ah, Haverner,” she got out. As she talked, her voice regained its normal huskiness, if not much steadiness. “Look, I guess I’m typical, from what bits and pieces we’ve told each other. Your agents, somehow they found out I need money, lots of money, desperately. They proved they were from Haverner Enterprises; they offered me a flat million dollars if I could do … do exactly right … a job they didn’t describe…. They gave me an airline ticket and hotel reservation in Ciudad Vizcaya, some pocket cash, instructions to meet your pilot this morning—and that’s all! That’s all!”

  She bit her lip, fumbled in the purse on the flagstone deck beside her, found a handkerchief and dabbed at the sweat that ran down her forehead to sting her eyes, at the juice that had stained her plain white dress.

  “Indeed,” Haverner replied. “My representatives made clear to you—did they not, Mrs. Petrie?—this is an experiment in psychology. It is not the first conducted here, though it will probably be the most interesting.” He raised a hand. “No, of course you have not read about the earlier ones. I have not published, and my volunteer subjects have not been the sort of people who run to the news media with accounts of their experiences. Nothing sensational, anyhow; please understand that. Simply the unorthodoxy of a lay researcher.

  “Still”—he leaned forward, making the Morris chair creak— “you must realize, ladies and gentlemen, under stress as you are, that stress is what the present experiment is about.”

  Ellis Nordberg cleared his throat. “Well, yes,” he said, “but you must realize in your turn, Mr. Haverner, we aren’t going to play your game for nothing. I hired a few investigators myself after I’d been approached.”