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Page 12.
 As Pino pulled in, he looked at his watch. There were rules for everything, and Pino himself was a stickler. He turned off the radio, having fastidiously sampled its luxury, but not wanting to overdo it. He was expected back in one hour, so he would not need to garage the car. He pulled up at a corner with water, soap, and mild brushes, where drivers could wash their cars. He soaped his prize, scrubbed her gently, and rinsed her off. Nearby at the edge of the tarmac was a shady drying spot, where the sun could not make shadowy photo-imprints of dying bubbles, and where an ever-active sirocco wind would dry the car in minutes like a warm hair dryer. Satisfied, Pino walked toward the little park, while extracting a pack of filtered Gitanes-blondes.
He stepped through a grapevine bower into the little park, which was a waiting area for drivers. A Gitane (gypsy woman) cigarette stuck stiffly from his lips, waiting for a light. Gravel crunched under his hard leather soles as he sought a cool place to sit—one of several wooden park benches provided for drivers. Pino brushed it carefully, to make sure it would not dust up his freshly dry-cleaned suit. Then he sat down, a fastidious man.
The park was shielded on all sides by thorn and brush cherry thickets. He heard bees nuzzling about. Further on, in its mysterious depths, shadowy statuary loomed under blackish olive tree crowns. Pino lit his cigarette with a gilded Zippo, which made a satisfying click as he put it in his suit pocket. The air filled around him with the first blue smoke of a fresh light that is magic to smokers, as the first phantoms of opium are to an addict. Wishing he had a radio or a drink out here, Pino tapped his foot to a remembered tune in the classic terakota reggae beat. He sat staring at the entrancing blue-black-white image of a flamenco-style gypsy woman dancing amid smoke with a tambourine.
Pino did not notice the dark shadow that crept close behind him on spirit feet.
Pino kept puffing; kept tapping his foot. He sat with his left hand gripped on the edge of the bench, and his right hand near his face with the cigarette.
A piano wire garrote silently stretched from one very dark hand to another behind Pino.
Pino thought of an African girl he liked in Palermo, named Efioanwan. She liked him, and he could imagine her in bed with him. He held her, as night closed around them, and she reached for him with a look of passion in her happy eyes and dazed face.
Dark hands crept from the brush like snakes, their fingers clawed for a strike.
No sooner did Pino hold his right hand away from his mouth, to flick ash carefully on the gravel by his feet, than the garrote flew over Pino's head. He had no time to react. He felt the swish of wind down his face, and heard the taut twang as it fastened on his neck. He felt the pressure of rock-hard fists on either side of his neck, as well as the edges of the device's wooden handles pressing on his arteries. In seconds, Pino blacked out, still with the vision of Efi reaching toward him.
Lucky Pino—his last look was the one of love.
On the second story of the Villa Caproni, one of the men-in-black escorts ushered Louis Cartouche into a cool meeting hall. This room contained an ornately carved oak table and a dozen matching chairs, one at each end, and five on each long flank. Louis had parted with his ice waters in a lavishly marbled upstairs lavatory. His lips were dry, and was ready for more water—more to settle his nervousness than to quench any thirst.
"Come in, Monsieur Cartouche. We have been expecting you," said man with a strangely accented voice. It took Louis a few moments to realize that the speaker was not present in the room, unlike several underlings. The speaker appeared on a large format television screen of the type used in long-distance teleconferencing via satellite relays.
Marvels of technology! The voice sounded as if the man were in the room, but of course he was far away somewhere. Flanked by a half dozen or so real-life men and women in formal business suits, the image on the screen was of a balding man with florid face and wilting wheat-colored suit at some distant, sunny location. Three men and two women rose briefly, as one of the escorts seated Cartouche and then left.
"Thank you for having me," said Cartouche, taking a seat.
"My name is George Blechstein," said the man on the conference screen at the head of the table. Louis rolled through his memories of foreign accents until he figured out that his host spoke in Dutch Afrikaans, that South African English accented with strongly rolling r’s. "My esteemed associates present here, all with Global Anaconda, are…" and he introduced his half dozen colleagues, who only filled a third of the long table. The room was otherwise empty except for a large wall map—a Mercator projection of the planet Earth.
Each person reached out to shake Cartouche's hand. The two women sat on either side of him, one a fresh-faced blonde named Mademoiselle Tissy from Brussels, the other a dour, older businesswoman named Frau Eiswarzen from Berlin. The men represented peoples from around the world—Spanish, Italian, Chinese, and more. The Spaniard made sure Cartouche understood he was Basque, while the Italian was a separatist from Milan, and an Asian man identified himself as native Formosan.
Blechstein droned on: "In our little subculture within Global Anaconda, we all represent dispossessed or disenfranchised cultures, as do you do, Mr. Cartouche, coming from the Quebec nation. We welcome you. A seventh guest had hoped to join us today—Dr. James Steward of Atlanta, Georgia—but he regrettably has been detained by business matters at home. The Confederate States of America are nonetheless well represented in our covert company, which is a tiny subsidiary among Global Anaconda's myriad coils. You are giving us a powerful tool that interests our company leadership, for which we will reward you quite handsomely. Our task force related to your invention is called Project David, Mr. Cartouche, and we shun publicity. That recalls the Biblical story of David, with his slingshot bringing down the giant Goliath."
Cartouche sipped from a half-full glass of bottled water. In modern parlance, a company was a wholly owned subsidiary of a corporation, which was an independent legal entity. A consortium, of which the world had at most one thousand, was a combined governmental and corporate giant with its own passports and euphemistically named security forces. If the traditional corporation was a fictitious person in the law, then a consortium (or corponation) was a fictitious nation. One still spoke of nation states as a convenient handle. In practical terms, global corporate power had made nation states obsolete.
"Can we offer you anything more?" asked Blechstein. "A nice brandy perhaps, or an espresso?"
"I'm fine," Cartouche said. "Thank you. I had some brandy on the plane. If I have another, I'm afraid I may fall asleep."
Everyone laughed politely.
"We like to meet our business partners in person," said Blechstein. "Thank you for indulging us during your long plane trip. I trust everything went well?"
Cartouche grinned nervously. "Yes—how could it not, with Frankfurt 2 and Cairo 14 in the last minute of play?"
Light laughter and applause rippled around the table. Louis felt he was making a good impression.
"We all await Cairo's upcoming victory in London later this week," Blechstein said. "A man after my heart." He seamlessly changed topics. "Our Quebec bureau has communicated that you shared some enticing preliminary plans with them about two years ago, from which Anaconda engineers, with your guidance in Montreal, have now developed a full scale model."
"Yes," Cartouche said. He broke into a sweat so intense it was nearly painful. Yes, he was paranoid. He admitted it to himself. His life’s work was riding on it. And he was sick unto death of being abused, ignored, and humiliated, being treated like a vagrant who had to practically beg for his meals while lesser, stupider men bereft of original ideas lived in palaces and dined on caviar. No matter what the implications, moral or otherwise, Louis knew he could not endure any more of that life. Here was his only chance to possess money, power, and satisfaction.
The Pollux twin, resembling the orbiting Capricorn itself, was in a Montreal warehouse. Louis had copied the designs from old Keyhole and Corona models now kept in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. As soon as they made his money over to him, he would hand them the keys to Pollux. Let the game begin.
"Mr. Cartouche, are you are ready then to sign today, so that we can move on with your first full payment, and our first production model?"
"Yes, if the terms are as I had suggested to me. That would be quite appropriate."
"No problem at all," said Blechstein. He—or his image—could be seen looking through some charts and drawings on a portable digital work desk. Louis recognized the new 24" digital tablepad made by Global Anaconda’s wholly owned subsidiary Macrohard. Blechstein looked entirely relaxed and businesslike. After the chaos and economic catastrophe at the end of the nationalist era, the world corponational order was refreshingly efficient and beneficial—as long as one did not cross their bottom line.
Louis said: "If we sign today, I am prepared to hand over Pollux and its plans. I will join you in he operational coordination of the combined, tandem Castor and Pollux control system."
"Bravo,” said Blechstein, who then read from his pad at a fast and somewhat blurry pace (no matter; Cartouche had already read a draft while still home in Montreal): "We propose to pay you half a million dollars U.S. per year, for rest of your natural life, in return for the entire, all, and unencumbered rights and your complete, unconditional, and eternal release to us, of all central, tangent, subsidiary, and peripheral plans, images, patents, copyrights, trademarks, tradenames, and trade signs, pertaining to your proprietary invention, blah blah blah, called hereafter the Orbital Sniper Technology, or OST. The sum of one million Euros annually will be deposited into a bona fide territorial bank account of your choosing. Furthermore, we propose to pay you another half million dollars U.S. per annum for your services as a consultant, at your home in Montreal, with all the staff you need for personal comfort and to accomplish your job as an employee of Anaconda."
Blechstein looked up as if needing oxygen. He regarded Louis as if Cartouche were a tedious individual who had hopefully heard enough to be satisfied.
"I agree," Cartouche said. He felt bathed in happiness—and in relief, since his lifetime of poverty and struggle appeared to be finally over now. He loved the terms as presented to him here. He felt so warm and gushy, he nearly peed with all that water inside of him. Automatically, he reached for a fresh bottle from among those in the center of the conference table, but his hand shook severely. The pretty blonde on his left heaved her shapely form, in a classic little black dress, and poured a fresh glass for him. He noticed—as she leaned across the table directly before him to reach for his bottle—that she wore a pink bubblegum-colored thong under the dress. She was so close that he could see the weave in her fine cloth, and smell faint essences of perfume and sweat in the natural folds of her perfectly taut young body. Cartouche understood that Global Anaconda, in its supreme skills at manipulation, had posted a sensuous daughter figure at his left, and a strong matron at his right.
The agreement was quickly reached. Guided by the men and women at the table, Louis signed for an electronic bank draft for half a million dollars at the table, with fingers so cold from excitement and fright that they were numb and nearly immobile. "Take your time, Sir," whispered the Belgian doll at his left ear. An unmarried man, who rarely dated, Cartouche would have loved to roll blissfully toward her, take her in his arms, and let her kisses descend on him as he closed his eyes. This moment was the fulfillment of a lifetime of dreams. He felt nearly orgasmic. He had been suffering for so long, and so lonely, that he was ready to throw his life to the winds in exchange for one passionate hug and kiss with her. He was taking the chance of a lifetime. He was throwing everything to the winds and hoping for the best.
As they finished the deal, Cartouche felt drained, exhausted, and pleased beyond measure.
“Thank you, Monsieur Cartouche,” Blechstein intoned. "Your technology, the OST, is extremely powerful. It sounds scary and it is. We intend to do as we have done for many years—offer it to responsible partners for good purposes. Just think, Cartouche. Nation states are a pale imitation of their former selves, and how else would we rid the world of any more Saddams or Kim Jong Uns if they rose to power? The answer does not lie in gratuitous wars that inflict untold carnage on innocent millions, while the usual predators profiteer. Instead, we now have an advanced tool for nipping the problem in the bud by assassinating the typical dictator secretly, from outer space, with no political or judicial repercussions. You are giving the world a wonderful gift."
Cartouche grew animated. "That was my very premise from the beginning. I thought: what if a responsible consortium, in the spirit of maintaining commerce and order, were to obtain a secret injunction declaring war, just long enough to eliminate the scourge of a Milosevic or a Kim Dong Ill, and then close the books as if nothing happened? The world goes on, corponations thrive, people have jobs, and all's well that ends well."
Blechstein nodded. "Machiavelli meets Morality. My kind of man. Pragmatism wins."
"Whatever works," Louis said. He was tired, and didn't care what they did, as long as he got paid.
"The world will thank you one day soon," said Blechstein. “You, Monsieur Cartouche, will be a famous man forever in the history books.” The screen went blank, signaling that the meeting was over. The men shook hands.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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