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  After the war, during the Adenauer years, Hesselmann became head of military intelligence for the Federal Republic and later served as officer commanding his country’s antiterrorist kommando, the Grenzschutzgruppe-9 of the Federal Border Guard which, under him, was West Germany’s equivalent of Britain’s Special Air Services Regiment. After that came the NATO posting.

  But Hesselmann, impelled by forces he did not clearly understand — having to do with a sense of duty, a sense of debt, a sense of shame — and bored with NATO’s cold war, returned to the real war of the closing decades of this century, a stylized, guesswork war with invisible fronts, fading targets; a war with an infinite subtlety.

  He turned his mind to Giuseppe Nero. He prayed that the capture would be worth the cost. Already Nero had become an expensive prisoner, because after an initial euphoria over his capture — while he was delivering a ransom message — the public had grown restive as Carlotta and Giulietta Calza remained at risk. The terrorists had sent a tape-recorded plea from the actress to a Rome television station and all of Italy had been aroused.

  And now the Group had been condemned by the media for having interfered with the plans of an Italian industrialist — once Miss Calza’s lover — to redeem the captives with a hundred million lira. The Italian government seemed about to bend under, offering to negotiate the terrorists’ second demand, the release of the Milan Nine, arrested two months ago and soon to be tried. Libya was prepared to accept them. For humanitarian reasons, Ghaddafy had announced. Humanitarian reasons: Hesselmann smiled a bitter smile.

  But how much more public anger would explode around them if Hesselmann didn’t break Nero by four o’clock this afternoon? At that time, three hours from now, the terrorists were going to cut off both thumbs from the hands of twelve-year-old Giulietta Calza — unless Giuseppe Nero was released. The kidnappers had made the threat in a letter to the Osservatore, with the child’s inked thumbprints on the envelope. They claimed to have been betrayed: their emissary, Nero, had been on his way to pick up the hundred-million-lira ransom when grabbed by Group agents.

  But we will break Nero today, Hesselmann thought. And not just for the hostages. Through him we will break every safe house of the Rotkommando, for if Nero was on the Central Committee with Wurger he was the possessor of its darkest secrets. Do this right, and the Rotkommando will perish in the blood of its well-born fanatics, the psychopathic refuse of the bourgeoisie.

  He took more of his chalky goo.

  * * *

  “He shows extreme discipline,” Pétras said. “He has obviously been trained for . . . exigencies such as this.” As seen on the computer monitor Giuseppe Nero was floating upside down, his feet almost at the sealed tank-top. “For a man under stress — I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

  “You have never done anything like this before,” Hamilton Bakerfield said. “Except maybe with rats and rabbits.”

  The microphone was open. “Execution is a secret action in which the least number of guerrillas is involved,” Nero was saying in a flat voice. “One sniper, patiently, alone, unknown . . .”

  Hesselmann pointed to the small cylinder tank containing compressed Dioxygone, and asked Pétras, “How much of this can he take?”

  “How would he know?” said Bakerfield, bitchy with fatigue.

  “I have told you, I am certain we can go to sixty pressure,” said Pétras. “Triple his present intake.”

  “What would happen to him?” said Hesselmann.

  “He will be more malleable. There could be, perhaps, a minor psychotic attack, but that would pass.”

  “Sixty?”

  “Fifty, perhaps sixty.” Hesselmann did not like the uncertain tone in Pétras’s voice. “The computer will tell us immediately if a problem is forming.”

  “Raise it to thirty-five,” Hesselmann said.

  Pétras turned a valve. Bakerfield watched with narrowed, doubting eyes.

  “Giuseppe Nero, you will have your freedom, the new identity, the money, everything we have promised,” Hesselmann said into the mike.

  “The first sin of the guerrilla is to . . . underestimate the enemy . . . to think him stupid . . .” Nero was giving evidence of struggle.

  Hesselmann’s voice was controlled, commanding. “Wurger is with your friends from the Turin brigade, yes? They have Miss Calza?”

  “The second sin . . . is cowardice.”

  Hesselmann winced, feeling the man’s pain and nausea.

  “Answer the questions and you will feel no pain. Does Wurger have Calza and her daughter?”

  “Yes.” Furious struggle. The needles of the readout gauges on the computer auxiliary panel were pulsing wildly. “NO! NO! DIO!”

  “But we know this anyway. We ask you only to confirm.” Calm, reassuring.

  There was the sound of sobbing. Hesselmann glanced at Pétras, who smiled confidently, nodding, as if to say, “You see, it’s starting to work.” He pointed to the cylinder valve and arched his eyebrows at Hesselmann in a question.

  Hesselmann took a deep breath then mouthed the word “Cinquante,” and Pétras turned the dial. The readout needles seemed to settle back.

  “Giuseppe Nero, can you hear me?”

  “Yes.” The voice floated from the speakers as if from a great distance.

  “You must answer my questions now, and you must answer them truthfully. Because if you do not you will be in an eternal hell of lunacy and pain. Do you understand?” Hesselmann glanced at Bakerfield, hoping to see some support from him. Bakerfield’s face had clouded.

  A long pause, then a soft laugh from Nero. “Yes, I understand. You will kill me.” His voice was oriented, in control. He sighed. “Everyone dies anyway. What matters is how, and how you lived. Fighting the militarists and the pigs as a human being for the liberation of man, loving life, disdaining death, that is how I lived and that is how I shall die.”

  Hesselmann looked at the smiling Pétras. Dr. Mengele. I, the inquisitor. Auschwitz. “Where is Signorina Calza?”

  A scream that strangled in the throat. “Parasite! My death will explode upon the conscience of the masses!”

  “Is she with Karl Wurger?”

  Another scream. “DIO! SI!”

  “Who else is in the group?”

  “Grazzoni!” The name exploded as if from between clenched teeth.

  “Yes, who else?”

  “Cuyfer! Zahre!” Wurger’s girlfriend. “Pergo, Bellini. That is all. Cristo!”

  “Where is Signorina Calza being held?” Do not let him rest.

  “In Turin.” The voice was suddenly calm. The readouts showed that Nero’s resistance had ended. He had been broken.

  “Address.”

  “Apartment 2-B, Caradoso Strada, 21.”

  Hesselmann nodded to Bakerfield, who went to the intercom unit by the front door. An assault group would leave by helicopter immediately, and radio would be in quick contact with Italy’s Squadro Anti-Commando.

  He decided to pump this man empty.

  “The Turin house, your unit, where is it located?”

  Nero gave an address in a working-class area.

  “The main Paris house. Address please.”

  “I do not know.” The voice sounded eerie, words from outer space.

  He asked about the Berlin, Zurich, and Amsterdam houses, but Nero did not know where they were either.

  “You are on the Central Committee?” Hesselmann believed at least eleven persons were on Rotkommando’s controlling body, representatives of Italian, German, Japanese, Palestinian groups, loners like Cuyfer.

  “Yes.”

  “What is planned, Giuseppe Nero? After Calza, what has been planned?”

  No answer. Tremors among the indicator needles. Surely Nero knew the Central Committee’s next target.

  “Rotkommando is training
soldiers for a major operation, yes, is that so?” Hesselmann persisted. There had been evidence of a recruiting campaign, of disenchanted youths disappearing from the streets of Europe.

  Nero was struggling again, gasping. His arms were jerking.

  “God,” he said, “I have stars in here.”

  Pétras made the okay sign with his fingers.

  “What is the next operation?” A trap could be sprung.

  “I . . . I . . .”

  The needles were pulsating.

  “Dio! Stars!”

  “What is next?” The question was barked.

  “MECCA!”

  Had he heard correctly? Mecca? Saudi Arabia?

  “I am with stars! They are exploding!”

  “What will happen in Mecca?”

  “You promised!” Nero screamed. “You promised I would be sane! I have left my body! Dio! I have left my body!”

  Nero’s voice rose to a high pitch, then cracked. Dials were jumping and the screen was flashing red numbers among the green. Pétras’s color was white.

  “Mecca — what is that?” said Hesselmann.

  A cackling laugh. Then a shriek. “Stars, they are exploding! Hydrogen! Hydrogen! Oxygen! It explodes!”

  “Jesus Christ,” Bakerfield said, looking at the flailing, spastic motions of Nero’s image on the screen.

  Pétras, seemingly frozen in position, was blinking his eyes, staring at the monitor. Then, without pausing to shut off the Dioxygone valve, he raced up a metal staircase to the top of the immersion tank and like a man possessed began spinning the wheel that broke the seal.

  “I EXPLODE!” Nero’s voice was inhuman, high-pitched, shattered. Now there came a peal of hoarse, gravel-throated laughter from the speakers.

  Pétras sprung open the tank top. Bakerfield joined him and they reached deep into the water, hefting Nero from the tank by his flailing legs. Now came his arms, his hands in foam mittens as big as soccer balls, his torso, his head, his eyes, stark above the oxygen mask and sunk darkly into their sockets.

  Hesselmann just stared at this fantasy, at the naked guerrilla suddenly freeing himself from Pétras and Bakerfield, dancing crazily on top of the tank and upon the steel-ribbed stairway platform, his voice triumphant. “I am of the stars! I am of the stars!”

  Nero kicked, and swung his arms at Bakerfield, who was trying to grab him. He had cleared his mouth from the oxygen mask, and with his teeth was tearing the foam encasing his hands, freeing them. Hesselmann ran to the Dioxygone cylinder to turn it off, but as he reached it, it was jerked away from him, Nero pulling it up the wall of the isolation tank by its hose.

  Grasping the end of the hose, he swung the cylinder in a great circle, forcing Bakerfield and Pétras to duck low, and the cylinder splintered the glass and wooden framework of a pair of windows looking down over the chasm of the Orco Valley.

  “Achenar, Antares, Sirius! I am a star! Red star exploding!” Nero took a perfect swan dive through the open window and passed into eternity.

  2

  Sunday, October 2, Gran Paradiso

  Heinrich Hesselmann listened to the news from the portable radio in his office.

  “Following a phone call from their kidnappers, they were found alive today in an abandoned farmhouse near Turin, where they had apparently been moved following the capture of Professor Nero. Both are said to be resting in hospital, Giulietta receiving treatment for her two maimed hands. In the meantime, the prosecutor’s office in Rome has announced that criminal charges have been withdrawn against the Milan Nine and the prisoners flown to Libya. A spokesman for industrialist Eugenio Serri has refused to confirm whether ransom money has also been paid in the securing of —”

  He flicked off the switch, donned his greatcoat, and went outside. He walked slowly, limping, to the escarpment, and looked over the vast panorama of the valley. He stood like a sentry, back straight, legs straight, his cane tucked between elbow and waist.

  He stood there for nearly an hour.

  He watched the sun set in the southwest, watched it die behind clouds that had turned orange in receiving it, then red and violet as the sun passed beyond the far mountains. Now the gloom of night was spreading across the sky from the east, and the last swallow was diving for its nest in the recesses of the cliffside below.

  He wondered what they were saying, his old comrades-in-arms, in the officers’ mess at German intelligence. Old Heini Hesselmann, growing senile, can’t stop playing the game. Fell flat on his face over that business with the Jewish actress and her daughter. Thinks the people he’s dealing with are gentlemen, like Russian spies. It’s age, of course. Poor Hesselmann.

  My damn gut.

  I am an old soldier. But I cannot quit. I owe too much.

  He swiveled smartly, winced as his lame leg gave slightly, then marched slowly to his quarters.

  Part II

  Le Grand Slaque

  Happy it is for mankind that Heaven has laid on few men the curse of being poets.

  — Frank Frankfort Moore

  3

  Thursday, December 15, Cuba

  His Muse, that formerly fecund goddess of his art, was barren. Many times had Jacques Sawchuk lashed out at her: “You sexless whore! Speak to me!” His Muse rewarded him with a writer’s block that sat on him, smothered him, crushed him.

  Never had he known this. In the sixteen years since he had first been published (Chansons d’Immoralite, Aardvark Press, $2.85. “The author of this salacious romp, only sixteen, is a poet of the so-called ‘Beat’ generation . . .”), never had a writer’s block of such awesome dimension gripped Jacques Sawchuk. It had been going on now for nearly seven months. All he had been able to compose were book reviews and some political commentary, including an excoriation of his host government which had just appeared in the New Left Quarterly.

  Sawchuk had tried everything. Meditation. Alcohol. Ancient Ukrainian garlic cures. Mostly he had sat in front of a Remington upright that had been beaten cruelly by the writer over the years, and had waited and waited, staring at the machine, memorizing its bolts and screws.

  He had rapped out babblings, hoping they would somehow transform into verse. He had stared out the window watching the waves break on the white sand. Crunch, swish. Crunch, swish. For a few weeks he had whipped himself mercilessly through the pages of an intended short story, but with no artistic impulse, no images from the mind’s eye, just his brain propelling the fingers over the keys, putting dead words and dead people on the pages. He read it and shredded it.

  Sawchuk had been on a long glissando. He had peaked at twenty-five, had been world-famous then, at least in radical-lit circles. The decline had set in a few years after he had come to Cuba. Now, at thirty-two, he saw himself regarded as very much passé. Rotting in the tropics. In Cuban asylum.

  The literary world derided him now. His last book of poetry and his last collected stories had been panned. His publisher had 5,000 copies of Various Views still in their cardboard boxes. Was it critical and commercial failure, he wondered, that had shocked his Muse into this ultimate infertility?

  Failure. Failure of talent, failure of the benison of acclaim. And failure of gods. Those gods of the Left that had succored him, filled him with their idealistic milk. Gods that had fed him with a fervor for justice among mankind, for Utopias. But cracks of doubt had developed and his edifice of belief was crumbling, and it had been doing so more and more rapidly as Sawchuk saw in increasing focus the People’s Democratic Republic of Cuba: all the pap and the propaganda and the endless tape and the ugly monotony and lifelessness of it all. “It is all supposed to work,” he found himself saying softly. Cuba had been the hope of the Western hemisphere. Now they had become like the Russians.

  Since the beginning of December, Jacques Sawchuk had begun giving in to sprees of drunken rowdiness — at the Liberation Bar in Nuevitas, at t
he cantina near his cottage, at beach parties. He would be back the next day pecking at his Remington, his head clanging, nothing of worth displaying itself on the page.

  The block had begun to express itself in a physical way. He felt constricted: his throat, his chest, his mind. He felt threatened by the walls squeezing in on him. “I need space about me!” he had roared one day, and had ordered carpenters from Nuevitas to tear down the partitions in his four-room villa. It became a one-room villa. His space.

  Jacques Sawchuk needed this space in part because he took up a lot of it. He was six feet, four inches tall, 220 pounds. There had been a time when he had been much fitter, back when he was on the run, and before that, when he had been a good amateur athlete. But now, he was so out of condition his limbs seemed loose and ill-fitting. He was what one would describe in his native Québec as “un grand slaque.”

  At the centre of his space was a snowdrift of crumpled paper, the failures that had flowed unceasingly from his heartless typewriter, atop an old mahogany table. Above that table was a three-foot-square mandala, suspended from the ceiling so that Sawchuk might find inspiration under the eye of God. Its wooden frame served as a perch for Chamberlain, the trilingual macaw, a large, multicolored bird of uncertain age who would occasionally drop small bombs on the typewriter, like bad reviews.

  A somewhat deflated basketball sat on the floor in the area one would call kitchen. The counters there contained several dozen jars of various grains and herbs, brown rice, dried fruit. A garlic ring hung near the propane stove.

  Windows on the north and east walls overlooked a beach of ground coral and palm-tufted cays beyond the bay. Between the windows, against the walls, books were stacked, hundreds of them, works by ancient and modern poets, dramatists, fiction writers, sources of former inspiration; and Marx, Marcuse, Huxley, Sartre, sources of former truth and present disenchantment.