"They're on their way," Abner Buell said.
Marcia smiled. The beautiful redhead was wearing a transparent mesh leotard. "Good," she said. "I want to watch them die."
"You will," Buell promised. He really liked this woman.
"And then the whole world?" she said.
"Yes." He liked her a whole lot.
They were very much alike, but in very different ways. Buell had grown up and become a creator and player of games. So had Marcia, but her games involved her body and the clothing she wore, and alone of all the women Buell had ever met, she was able to arouse him. That was the good cake and the icing was that she was just as cruel, just as uncaring of other people, as Buell himself.
"I've got a game for the evening," she said.
"What is it?" Buell asked.
"You'll see," Marcia promised. She dressed and drove with Buell in one of his Mercedes sports cars into Los Angeles, where they parked the car on a side street near the Sunset Strip.
They stood on a corner of the Boulevard as Marcia looked up and down at the flow of sodden humanity that snarled its way past them.
"What are we waiting for?" Buell asked.
"The right person and the right time," Marcia said.
After a half-hour, she said to him in an excited voice: "This one who's coming."
Buell looked up and saw a man in his early twenties weaving down the street. He had metal hanging from both ears and wore a leather vest over a bare chest. His belt was studded with chrome diamonds. He weaved as he walked and his eyes were half-closed, heavy-lidded, with the look of the alcoholic or the junkie.
"What a swine," Buell said. "What about him?"
"Give him money. A hundred dollars," she said.
When the man reached them, Buell stopped him and said, "Here." He pressed a hundred-dollar bill into his hand.
"It's about time America gave me something," the man snapped, and staggered off without even so much as a thank-you.
Buell turned toward Marcia to see what the next step in the game was, but Marcia had gone. He saw her half a block away. She was talking to a uniformed policeman. He saw Marcia point in his general direction, and suddenly the policeman started running away from her toward Buell.
Marcia trotted after him.
But the policeman ran right past Buell. He drew his gun as he neared the young man in the leather vest.
Marcia said to Buell, "Okay, let's go."
She pulled him away from the corner back toward their car.
"What'd you do?" he said.
"I told that cop that you and I had just been robbed at gunpoint by that degenerate. That he had a loaded gun and threatened to kill us or anyone who stopped him. That he took a hundred dollars off us."
She giggled.
They were at the car door when they heard the shots. One. Two. Three.
Marcia giggled again. "I think he resisted arrest."
They got into the car, drove to the corner and then turned right onto Sunset Boulevard. As they drove past the scene, they saw the policeman standing, gun still drawn, over the dead body of the man Buell had given the hundred dollars to.
"Wonderful," Buell said.
Marcia smiled, basking in his praise.
"What a great game," Buell said.
"I love it," she said. "Can we play again?"
"Tomorrow," he said. "Let's go home now and make love."
"Okay," she said.
"And you can wear a cowboy suit," he said.
"Ride 'em cowboy," she said. And giggled again.
He loved her.
sChapter Eight
His name was Hamuta and he sold guns, but not to everyone. He had a small shop in Paddington, a section of London with neat gardens in front of neat brick homes. It was a quiet neighborhood where no one bothered to ask Mr. Hamuta who his visitors were, even though they were sure they recognized some of them.
Generals and dukes and earls and members of the royal household generally had familiar faces, but while many were curious if that was really so-and-so leaving Mr. Hamuta's shop, no one asked.
One did not buy a rifle or a pistol from Mr. Hamuta by ordering one. First one had tea with Mr. Hamuta, if one could wangle an invitation. If one was of proper birth and proper connections, he might let a few retired officers know he was not averse to an afternoon tea with Mr. Hamuta. Then he would be checked far more thoroughly than candidates for the British Secret Service. Of course that was not saying much. There were stiffer requirements for getting a gas company credit card than for becoming a spy for British intelligence. But for Mr. Hamuta, one had to be absolutely able to keep one's mouth closed, no matter what one saw. No matter how revolting it was. No matter how much one wanted to cry out: "Mercy. Where is mercy in this world?"
And if one was found acceptable, he would be told a day and a time and then he had to be on time to the second. At the prescribed hour, the door of Mr. Hamuta's shop would be open for exactly fifteen seconds. If one was even a second later than that, he would find the door locked and no one would answer.
In the window of Mr. Hamuta's shop was one white vase which held a fresh white chrysanthemum every day. It sat on black velvet. The shop had no sign and sometimes people wanting to buy flowers would try to enter but they too found the door locked.
Once, some burglars who were sure valuable jewels were inside the shop had broken in. Their bodies were found a month later, decomposed in a garbage dump. Scotland Yard assumed they were the refuse of just another gang rub-out until a forensic scientist examined the skulls. They had been furrowed with small marks like wormholes.
"Say, Ralph," said the scientist to his partner in the morgue. "Do these look like wormholes to you?"
The other pathologist took a magnifying glass to the rear of the skull and peered closely. He wore a breathing mask because the stench of a decomposing human body was perhaps the most noxious smell another human could be exposed to. Coming near a dead body on the rot would leave the stench in one's clothes. It was why pathologists always wore washable polyester suits. Death never came out of wool.
"Too straight," Ralph finally said. "A wormhole gets into a bone by a burrowing process. It turns. These are more like small nicks."
"Let me see, Ralph."