Free Shibumi by Trevanian

with powder blue. Logically enough, subjects who worked indifferently for both sides were identified with purple, but Fat Boy remembered His problem with Black Power actives, and so he grayed the purple down to mauve.
    Further, Fat Boy reserved the mauve card for men who dealt specifically in assassination.
    The First Assistant looked up quizzically from his console. “Ah… I don’t know what’s wrong, sir. Fat Boy is running statement/correction/statement/correction patterns. On even the most basic information, his various input sources disagree. We have ages for this Nicholai Hel ranging from forty-seven to fifty-two. And look at this! Under nationality we have a choice among Russian, German, Chinese, Japanese, French, and Costa Rican. Costa Rican, sir?”
    “Those last two have to do with his passports; he holds passports from France and Costa Rica. Right now he lives in France—or he did recently. The other nationalities have to do with his genetic background, his place of birth, and his major cultural inputs.”
    “So what is his real nationality?”
    Mr. Diamond continued to look out the window, staring at nothing. “None.”
    “You seem to know something about this person, sir.” The First Assistant’s tone was interrogative but tentative. He was curious, but he knew better than to be inquisitive.
    For several moments, Diamond did not answer. Then: “Yes. I know something about him.” He fumed away from the window and sat heavily at his desk. “Get on with the search. Turn up everything you can. Most of it will be contradictory, vague, or inaccurate, but we need to know everything we can discover.”
    “Then you feel that this Nicholai Hel is involved in this business?”
    “With our luck? Probably.”
    “In what way, sir?”
    “I don’t know! Just get on with the search!”
    “Yes, sir.” The First Assistant scanned the next fragments of data. “Ah… sir? We have three possible birthplaces for him.”
    “Shanghai.”
    “You’re sure of that, sir?”
    “Yes!” Then, after a moment’s pause, “Reasonably sure, that is.”

Shanghai: 193?
    As always at this season, cool evening breezes are drawn over the city from the sea, toward the warm land mass of China; and the draperies billow out from the glass doors to the veranda of the large house on Avenue Joffre in the French Concession.
    General Kishikawa Takashi withdraws a stone from his lacquered
Gô ke
and holds it lightly between the tip of his middle finger and the nail of his index. Some minutes pass in silence, but his concentration is not on the game, which is in its 176th gesture and has begun to concrete toward the inevitable. The General’s eyes rest on his opponent who, for his part, is completely absorbed in the patterns of black and white stones on the pale yellow board. Kishikawa-san has decided that the young boy must be sent away to Japan, and tonight he would have to be told. But not just now. It would spoil the flavor of the game; and that would be unkind because, for the first time, the young man is winning.
    The sun has set behind the French Concession, over mainland China. Lanterns have been lighted in the old walled dry, and the smell of thousands of cooking suppers fills the narrow, tangled streets. Along the Whangpoo and up Soochow Creek, the sampan homes of the floating city are alive with dim lights, as old women with trousers tied at the ankle arrange stones to level cooking fires on the canted decks, for the river is at low tide and the sampans have heeled over, their wooden bellies stuck in the yellow mud. People late for their suppers trot over Stealing Hen Bridge. A professional letter writer flourishes his brush carelessly, eager to finish his day’s work, and knowing that his calligraphic insouciance will not be discovered by the illiterate young girl for whom he is composing a love letter on the model of one of his Sixteen Never-Fail Formulas. The Bund, that street of imposing commercial houses and hotels,