The Devil's Game Page 5

  A hand lifted into view in the mirror to make a reassuring gesture across white shirtfront and brown vest. “You would be mad if you were not astounded, not bewildered and dismayed. But consider yourself, your surroundings, the state of your own mind. Think back to whatever you recall of your dreams, and to the fever that had you delirious when you were sixteen, and to those few times when you let alcohol get the better of you. Compare. After you are satisfied, consider the possibility that this is real—if you have the manhood. ” Haverner clenched his fists. He stood unmoving for a while that his tin-plated alarm clock agreed was long. Finally he breathed, “Who are you? What are you?”

  “That comes later,” the face told him, and grinned. “Not time now. You have an engagement soon, remember?”

  “What do you want of me?”

  “Nothing to your harm. On the contrary, any agreement we may reach should be to your enormous advantage. I have no power to compel or hurt, only to advise and persuade.”

  “And … you … you gain …?”

  “I said we must carry this matter on, if you are willing, later. Not in one piece, either. You will need time to learn, think, understand, decide.” The face, which had taken on a serious expression, smiled anew. “As far as that goes,” it whispered in marvelously ordinary Americanisms, “I’ll want a chance to size you up before I decide what sort of partners we’d make. Meanwhile, for a sample, I’ll tell you: act natural tonight, and when Mr. Fielding brings up the Central American and Caribbean areas in talk, act real interested. Be interested. You could build yourself quite a future in those parts.” Sweat that was not from the sultriness stung Haverner’s eyes and drenched his armpits. As if out of the small white Congregational church of his boyhood Sundays, he mumbled, “ ‘—all the kingdoms of the world—’ ”

  “Oh, no,” answered the face, “Let us not get above ourselves, you and I.” It paused. “You have had a shock. Give yourself a chance to think. If, after that, you want to know more, be here at this hour alone, in eight days. If you aren’t, have no fears; you will never see me again. Good evening, Sunderland Haverner.”

  It did not vanish in a puff of smoke or anything like that. It simply resumed being his reflection.

  Somehow he went through the motions, walked down the hall to the bathroom and scrubbed the reek from his torso, changed his shirt, made his way to the home of his superior, was a deferential but brisk dinner guest who, over cigars and port (from the best bootlegger in New Orleans), listened closely to his host’s discourse on the commercial possibilities of the Central American-Caribbean region, and offered a few shrewd responses of his own.

  By the date of rendezvous, the episode of the mirror naturally seemed unreal. Haverner told himself that it must have been a dream his memory had displaced. He would keep its appointment merely out of a certain curiosity about how his own psyche worked, and to show he was not afraid, and, well, to make sure nothing was going wrong in his head. He disliked admitting what comfort lay in the fact that this was the Lord’s day, and that morning he found a bit more than expediency in attending services as usual at his boss’s church. He was not mired in medieval superstition, after all; he knew his Channing, Huxley, Spencer, yes, a bit of his Nietzsche.

  Thus he stood before his bureau mirror at the deeper dusk of an aging season while thunder boomed off Lake Pontchartrain, lightning flickered, a breeze flapped drapes, and down the hall Mr. Durant was playing “You Made Me Love You.” He decided he might allow as much as half an hour before he went to a movie.

  “Here I am, Sunderland Haverner.”

  The mirror showed him only himself agape. He whirled about, his heartbeat suddenly fast and thick. The whisper, if it was a whisper, was well-nigh directionless, but—but the left drape by the window no longer stirred in random fashion. The shabby cloth rippled around what might have been a human form standing against the wall behind it.

  The whisper laughed. “I have a variety of manifestations,” it said.

  Stiff-legged, Haverner approached. “You are welcome to touch,” the voice in the wind invited. When he poked, his finger met no resistance other than fabric and plaster; and the vague outline did not reappear until he stepped back.

  After several attempts he was able to croak, “Who are you? What do you want? And why me?”

  “You are promising material,” was the reply.

  “Material for what?”

  “The acquisition of wealth and power. The doing of mighty deeds. Are those not your dreams? Are you really content to serve other men until you are so old that they shrug you off? You will, you know, without the special advantages I can give you.”

  “Such as?”

  “Information, to start. For example …” and the voice told Haverner, in detail, of matters he had believed were secret to himself alone.

  “God in Heaven,” he mumbled, “what are you?”

  The sacred name did not frighten his visitor. “To explain that, at this stage, would be impossible. Probably it always will be. Perhaps later we can discuss it a little, if we form a partnership.”

  “What do you want?” Haverner repeated.

  “An associate who can act for me and with me in the human world. Again, there is no point in my going any further tonight. Let me simply assure you that I am no Mephistopheles. I have no desire for your soul, assuming you possess one, and you shall always be free to take any precautions against that that you wish. Nor do I pose the slightest physical threat to you. How could I?”

  Haverner stood for a minute, a hundred rapid heartbeats, while thunder growled and his cheap clock clattered and the Victrola began “There’s A Long, Long Trail A-winding.” Finally his face congealed, his hands clenched and he said, “Okay, no harm in talking, I guess. But what should I call you?”

  “You may as well follow tradition,” his visitor answered, “to the extent of calling me Samael.”

  Sunderland Haverner surprised and pleased his superiors by angling for transfer south. Not many young men would willingly forsake the delights of New Orleans for those unkempt and fever-ridden shores.

  Soon after his arrival there, Samael pointed out three soft spots in the Company’s way of operating, and suggested that Haverner call his employers’ attention to two of them. Repeatedly and with proper respectfulness, he did.

  One was its policy of buying only the absolute best of the tropical fruit available. This hurt numerous independent producers who had no other foreign market. Haverner’s reports argued for purchasing not the bad, but simply the slightly less than top-grade fruit, and marketing it more cheaply, more quickly, under a different brand name. Even if this would bring little additional profit, it could yield much good will.

  Then there was the Company’s policy of planting, or buying, just a single specific variety of any given fruit. Many more kinds existed. Should a blight or pest strike the favored crop, it would prove worthwhile to have other sorts growing in reserve areas.

  Certain further matters, he wrote, he would not raise at this point unless encouraged to do so, since he judged these two as being of primary importance.

  The Company’s home office assured him that his recommendations would receive due consideration.

  Persisting, he was at last informed that the regional superintendent would take the business up with him when next in port on his long annual round of inspections. This august official did not normally hold interviews with employees in Haverner’s pay grade. “However,” the superintendent said, “we regard you as a coming man, and we like your helpful spirit. So I’m going to take the time to make things clear to you.”

  The whole picture, as unfolded, included the Company’s policy of buying (and selling) only the very, very best of tropical fruit. It did not matter what happened to the rest of the crop. As for the independent producers, it was not thought desirable that they be more than nominally independent. The Company was aware that they had no alternative foreign market. The Company preferred this. It kept them on their toes.
As for the chance of disease or devourers attacking a Staple Variety, well, the Company retained some of the best agricultural scientists in the world. The Staple Variety had come to mean “tropical fruit” to the American and North European housewife; “tropical fruit” meant the Staple Variety.

  “We’ve spent fifty years educating them to expect the fat yellow bananas, for instance, and nothing else,” said the regional superintendent. “Why confuse them?”

  He invited Haverner to join him in a drink at the Club, the equivalent of a king on tour bestowing a decoration. Of course Haverner accepted.

  And, after a while, he requested a leave of absence to try out his ideas on his own time and with his own funds, in hopes that if he succeeded, the Company would like to take over the program. He needed a year of argument, and marriage to a slightly withered virgin of appropriate family during a visit to New York, before he was condescendingly given permission and paternally invited to reconsider.

  “You’ll lose your belly button, boy,” the port captain said to him on his return. “If there was money to be made your way, the Company would be making it right now.” Sunderland Haverner did not care what became of his belly button, which had long ceased to be of any special use or interest to him. His chief concern was the Sindicado Registrado Centroamericano, etc., etc., a corporate person that had lain on a shelf in a lawyer’s office for better than a decade.

  Abruptly it found itself taken down and dusted off, injected with money and expanded by several shareholders. These included the past president of one neighboring republic; the present president of another; the brothers-in-law of the chief of the Supreme Court of Santa Ana; sundry large landowners, all of pure Castilian stock; a Captain-General of the military, who was not Castilian but who spoke the tribal language of eleven thousand intensely armed little brown soldiers; one Chinese and three Levantine businessmen—

  —plus, naturally, Sunderland Haverner.

  Samael was no constant companion. In fact, the apparitions were infrequent, often months apart, and seemingly capricious. Nor were they apt to be of long duration. At critical periods Samael might be revealed, off and on, for days, even two or three weeks in a stretch. Ordinarily, though, it appeared sufficient for Samael to ask a few leading questions, give some valuable information and advice, all interspersed with sardonic remarks, and be gone again.

  Once his business had Haverner riding alone on a forest trail. As a rule he would have considered that unwise, in spite of being expert in the use of the revolver at his hip. Today he had reasons for not giving gossip a chance to spread, and the gentleman whom he was going to see had so thoroughly pacified the area of late that local people were calling it el cementerio.

  A slow wind broke the hot green silence of the trees and made the flecks of sunlight that fell on the mould beneath them dance. As his horse bore him onward, Haverner got the illusion that those spots blended into a flickery shape that trotted among the boles on his left hand. The soughing formed words that proposed he enact a profitable treachery upon the man he was to meet.

  “Are you really a demon, Samael?” he asked at the end of the suggestion. “I don’t have to believe your denial that your aim is to make me damn myself. Naturally, you’d be a liar.”

  “If you think that,” the other pointed out, “your logical course would be to break off our relationship and become a good churchman. You show no signs of intending either.”

  “No. Still, it doesn’t follow from the fact that there is no God, that there is no hell. Or you could be a ghost, or an astral projection, or one of those elves or witches that … m-m … lure men in the old ballads and stories.”

  “You have done some rather wide reading, I see.”

  “Yeah, I took time for it while I was Stateside. I wanted ideas. Read some of H. G. Wells and his imitators, too. You know about him?”

  “I do now.” Afterward Haverner realized how ambiguous a reply that had been.

  “Well, suppose you don’t belong here on Earth at all. Suppose you’re a being from Mars, or maybe a different solar system. You might not be here in your body. You might communicate with me by telepathy.”

  “It is obvious that I have knowledge of the minds as well as the doings of men,” said Samael almost merrily.

  “Well—” Eagerness stormed through Haverner. “Have I guessed right? Are you an extraterrestrial being? Or a superman from the future, come back in a time machine? Or are you a, a magical creature?”

  “To you,” gibed Samael, “what difference does it make?” The fight among shadows became scattered sunshine, and Havener rode silently on toward the man he would betray.

  This case was somewhat exceptional. By and large, his syndicate functioned smoothly.

  Take a bunch of tropical fruit that through, say, Latin or Indian impetuosity has been cut two days before it should have been. Allow it somewhat more jostle on muleback than has been accepted treatment. See it refused by the Company’s buyer. Immediately purchase it at a far lower price. Move it to the United States or northern Europe by a freighter that, unscheduled, is fast because of having few stops to make. Sell it when it looks as good as any Company article, and sell it at a slightly lower price. Multiply this by the millions.

  It adds up to a great deal of money.

  To be sure, the housewife might theoretically observe that your fruit does not keep as long. But this remains theoretical, since she did not buy it to keep, she bought it to eat. If faster ripened, it goes faster onto the table. Afterward she buys more, preferably at the same low cost.

  Before long the sindicado began to encourage the planting of non-Staple varieties in Santa Ana and adjacent countries. It is remarkable how persuasive eleven thousand soldiers can be. But they were not always necessary. For example, the few cents apiece that the new crops fetched locally were a few cents more than their planters would otherwise have had.

  Meanwhile, as Haverner had warned, disease did strike more than one Staple plantation. He was not prescient. Samael had urged he acquaint himself in depth with the findings of such impractical professors, as Thomas Hunt Morgan. Thus he had realized that mutations must inevitably happen. The effort to combat the resultant sicknesses was costly, and forced up the price of the product. This caused more housewives to patronize the competition.

  Over the years, the Company had developed short ways of dealing with dissenters. But in the present case it had tied its own hands. Being headed by realists, it bought the dissenters out. A number of aristocratic families moved en masse to Paris. New villas were built in the suburbs of Beirut, Aleppo, and Canton. A Captain-General of the military obtained considerable land holdings and married the daughter of a Castilian family in reduced circumstances. She never had the pleasure of meeting Augusta Haverner, nee Van Horn, who after her own wedding had spent several puzzled, wistful, lonely years before succumbing to the unfortunately unsuitable climate.

  She had requested burial “at home.” It meant an ancestral plot in upstate New York. Haverner did the decent thing and accompanied the sealed coffin by chartered steam launch to Miami, thence by Pullman (she in the freight car) to New York City, thence by hearse (he in a limousine) to the old village on the Hudson. He was overdue for certain conferences in Manhattan offices anyway.

  His in-laws asked him to spend a few days as their house guest after the funeral. He was as charming as a bereaved man properly could be, with many an anecdote from the exotic countries of his work. Other in-laws were among those he would be seeing in the city. When at last he could depart, he bade the chauffeur stop first at a florist’s shop, where he obtained a large bouquet of roses, then at the ancestral plot, where he went by himself to lay them on his wife’s grave and meditate awhile. Her kinfolk would hear about it and be appreciative.

  The wind was cool. Cloud shadows swept across rolling, verdant land and the mercury gleam of the river. That play of light seemed almost to make the headstones—whether blurred and lichenous, or sharp-edged as the one before which
he set the flowers down—grow tense, like soldiers waiting for a command. Or like faces waiting to speak. … He was hardly surprised when her inscribed name somehow hinted at brows above the eyes, that were the years of her birth and death, above a graven cross that was like a nose above a red bouquet that fluttered as if lips moved.

  “You proceed well, Sunderland Haverner,” Samael complimented him.

  “It’s been a long spell,” he said.

  “You had no need for me. However, when you want to negotiate a substantial loan—”

  “Yes, I know. Competition for money. I could use some leverage against those bankers. I was hoping you’d show.”

  “Actually, you should only take out the bare minimum necessary to finance your immediate future operations. I have a few ideas about how to do that. Soon, though, money, like men, will go begging.”

  Haverner stroked his chin. “You expect a crash? I’ve thought, more and more, I saw one coming.”

  “Yes. Then the opportunities for the right kind of manipulations will approach the limitless.”

  Haverner stood for a space in the noisy wind and the blowing shadows before he said, “You know, there are times when I think you don’t exist outside my own skull. Have you ever actually told me anything I couldn’t have Figured out for myself? Oh, yes, often unconsciously, by intuition—but you could be the other half of my split personality, Samael.”

  “Or you could be a dream of mine,” laughed the voice. “I have asked you before what difference it makes.”

  “None, I suppose. All right, let’s hear your ideas.” Having listened, he said, “Yes, that’s pretty much what I had in mind already, except …” and went into detail.

  “Good,” Samael declared. “You have learned. You will continue to learn. Proceed.”

  “What happens when I don’t need you anymore?” he wondered.

  “Maybe you never did,” Samael replied.

  Sunderland Haverner moved on.

  What he moved on to was those “further matters” he had mentioned in his reports of an earlier time but had never been invited to specify. Not that he had courted any such invitation. Honor had been served by a hint. The “further matters” concerned los otros derechos.