"Well, we just have to get rid of those bodyguards," another director said. He was a bristly man in his forties with a battalion-grade rust mustache. "Just can't have people running around killing our field hands. Not good form, don't you know?"
"No. No. True." Voices grunted around the table.
"We will get rid of them," Wissex said coldly.
"Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh."
The sound came from Uncle Pimsy at the end of the table. He had the cigar in his mouth now, still unlit, but the monocle had dropped again from his eye and he was trying to screw it back in.
He took a deep breath and began to speak again.
"Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh." It was a terminal rattle, but the men around the table waited for him to go on. They were used to his way of starting to talk.
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Finally, Pimsy polled the cigar from his mouth and said, "Can't get rid of those two. Can't. Don't you understand?" He voice was gravelly and the words came out sounding as if his lips had been frozen with novocaine and were unable to form letters correctly. Spittle flew from his mouth with the words and the directors nearest him leaned away.
Wissex said, "That's nonsense, Uncle Pimsy, and you know it."
"Ehhhhhhhhhhhhh," came the rattle again. "Tell them the truth, Neville. We're all going to die."
"Oh, come," said Neville. He looked around the table, smiling patronizingly. "Uncle Pimsy has the idea that these assassins are somehow indestructible. From the Orient. He wants us to pay them a tribute, if you can believe that."
The other directors looked first at Wissex, then at Pimsy. The old man had lighted his cigar. It filled the room with smoke as if it were a tubular tear-gas canister.
"Never liked the idea of stealing money from Moombooger," Pimsy said. "Go back to the good old days. Honest men doing honest work. You're ruining this house, Neville."
"By bringing in twenty million dollars?" he asked.
"By making us battle the House of Sinanju," Pimsy said.
"Times change," Wissex said quickly.
"Sinanju never changes," Pimsy said. "Ehhhhh-hhhh."
"What is Sinanju?" asked the director named Bentley.
"Another old house of assassins," Neville said.
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"Far as I can tell, it's been out of business for years. But Uncle's worried about it. Seems we met up once some hundreds of years ago and had some trouble with them. Uncle wants us to give the money back and strike our tents and go open cheese and tea shops." Anybody else want to do that besides Pimsy?"
He looked around the table. The directors were shaking their heads.
Pimsy groaned again. His monocle fell from his eye. He slumped back in his seat, as if exhausted from the effort of speaking. He puffed hard on his cigar and the smelly smoke hung in the air, a tangible fog.
"You're too clever by half, Neville. But you're going to kill all these people before you're done," Pimsy said.
"Shouldn't you go play with your poodle?" Neville snapped.
"Get rid of those bodyguards," Bentley said. "That should satisfy everybody."
"You're right," said Wissex "We concur. We will finish them off immediately. We will send our second best."
"Why second best?" asked Bentley.
"Because I have an appointment to ride to hounds this weekend. But no more foreign mongrels on this job. We will send Spencer."
"Spencer," one of the men hissed.
"Yes," said Wissex. "Commander Spencer."
There were murmurs of agreement around the table, and Wissex stood, signaling that the meeting was at an end. The others rose, still grinning and nodding to themselves.
1 SO
"Oh, yes, Spencer," one of them said.
Uncle Pimsy alone remained in his seat, his chin sunk down onto what used to be his chest before his chest went south into his stomach cavity.
He was shaking his head.
"We're all going to die," he said.
Mrs. Cholmondley Montague was on her hands and knees in the garden, plucking weeds from among her flowers, when she heard the sound. It sounded as if hell had sprung a leak, a whining, screeching sound, and she closed her eyes for a moment, praying that it was an illusion and there wasn't really any such sound; but the sound continued and got louder and louder.
It had long since been arranged among the neighbors that the first to hear the sound would alert all the others, for their mutual protection, so Mrs. Montague dropped her garden tools and ran inside the house.
She looked at the telephone, her British sense of duty pulling her toward it. But self-preservation came first and so she closed and locked her front door and windows before she picked up the phone.
From a list alongside the instrument, she started calling her neighbors.
"Yes. The bagpipes. He's started up again."
"Yes. He's started. Stay inside."
She even called that terrible woman who said her name was Mrs. Wilson, but God knew, she was probably an Italian or worse, a dark thing she was and hairy, but even hairy and dark, she deserved a warning.
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Still, Mrs. Montague had trouble keeping the chill out of her voice.
"I know this is the first time for you, so stay inside. I'll let you know when it's safe to come out. You can light a candle or do whatever it is your type of person does."
Soon, the quiet, dead-ended little mews was still. Only the sound of bagpipes hovered overhead. The houses looked as if they had been designed to keep out all light and air. Every door was bolted shut and every window tightly closed. Shades, Venetian blinds, drapes were pulled tight, as if the sun were a deadly bacteria-carrying enemy. Within moments, the neighborhood resembled one of those everybody-dead-by-occult-intervention neighborhoods from a Hollywood horror movie- still and unmoving as death, with only the eerie sound of the bagpipes hanging over all.