Henchman

Chapter I

HENCHMAN

For Alex Capelluto

“And now this new adventure set them philosophizing more than ever.” - Candide

Illustrations by Megan Gafford

Part One

I

So many of my friends are dead.

They were all so immediate for so long — so many hours upon hours just not being able to stand their company, their terrible jokes, their body odor (everybody in our line of work has bad body odor). Sometimes we played cards, sometimes we had little practical jokes, but mostly we sat around in lairs and control rooms and waited to see if any of us would be fed to the shark. I spent very little time thinking about any of them when they were here, but now that they’re not, I can’t help but have them flash in front of me, as a series of identifying details and grisly deaths.

Let’s see. There was Dietrich, the big Nazi, who really was an astonishing arm wrestler but then got chopped up in a propeller when he was in hand-to-hand combat and forgot to look behind him to see if by any chance there was a plane taxiing towards him. There was Odd Job, who wasn’t great company but had perfected a trick with a steel-tipped hat, and we used to gather round and watch him decapitate one-by-one all the golden sculptures in our lair. He had started to be able to do it at impossible distances and we had a bet going to see if he could do it to the Venus de Milo from a sniper’s nest on the street facing the Louvre, but before anybody could collect on it he was electrocuted on a fence in the depths of Fort Knox during an attempt to immolate the US’ gold supply and to create currency fluctuations all over the world. There was what-was-his-name, who was blond and muscled and didn’t talk much and couldn’t be persuaded to practice his karate as much as he really should have and didn’t leave much of an impression, but had this amazing ability to crush dice with his bare hands and looked great in a high-necked black turtleneck and then overlunged in a karate move and was flipped into the piranha pool and had, I think, just enough time to hear Bond saying “Bon appétit” before the piranhas closed in.

So many. At the moment I’m in the lair. The thing about the henchman business is that there’s a great deal of downtime. Your mind does tend to wander. You find yourself drifting sooner or later to trying to remember the name of that blond with the dice-crushing trick or to asking yourself what kind of voltage it must have been to incinerate Odd Job, who really was a big and powerful guy, and the mystery of it is why these kinds of thoughts never seem to occur to anybody else who is sharing the lair and control room and locker room and guard room and guard’s bathroom and turret and launching station with me. Well. It’s another thing that I find myself not really able to ask — or able to ask only if we’re on a long car ride, five of us wedged into the vehicle, all bristling with automatic weapons, waiting for just the moment when our inside man can jab his poison dart into the night watchman and steal his ID and then we can all go storming into the bank vault or the multinational office and either hold it hostage or cunningly pin the entire break-in on Bond, as we try to convince his boss that he has gone rogue, and then when it gets really boring and the silence really unbearable I might say something like, “What about Brunskill, he was a great second-story man, maybe we could get him for a job like this,” and there will be a slight twitch in the long silence as the automatic weapons are shifted around and maybe one of my guys crosses his legs to try to hold in a fart, and then one of the old hands will say, “Bond got him. Electrocuted in a bathtub.” “Oh yeah?” I’ll say. “Nobody told me. Well, did Bond have anything to say about it?” And the old hand will clear his throat and, in the way we talk, which cuts off any further conversation, he’ll say, “Shocking. Positively shocking.” And then we’ll all look out the window for a while or fiddle with our weapons and wait for the prearranged signal on the walkie-talkie that the night watchman has been safely disposed of and it's time to unleash mayhem. And then we all jump out of the car and break in and during the period of mayhem I have very few thoughts about any of this, about why nobody mentioned Brunskill’s electrocution to me or what the name was of the big blond in the turtleneck, but then the mayhem usually ends as quickly as it started, and as often as not I find myself holed up in some control room while our computer specialist tries to hack the unbreakable computer code and there’s a vigilante prowling around in the air duct and picking off our men one by one when they step out to investigate and then I’ll turn to Sod — let’s assume that Sod is with me — and say something like, “Have we been in this control room before?” and he’ll take a long pause since he doesn’t like to chit-chat and then he’ll say, “I think so, I think we were here with that German with the nice suits and the deep voice,” and I’ll say, “What happened?” and Sod will have to think about it for a while, either because he doesn’t like chit-chat and his father never engaged in it or because he genuinely doesn’t remember, and then he’ll say, “I’m pretty sure there was a cop who happened to be in the building and killed everybody and then threw the German off the roof just before his detonator could go off,” and that does ring a bell, and then we’ll sit in the control room in companionable silence while the hacker mutters at the computer until the vigilante starts picking off enough of our crew and either Sod or I are sent to investigate.

But anyway. That’s being on the job — in missile robberies and hostage situations and that sort of thing. In the lair it’s different. We have already stolen two atomic bombs and are using them to extract a ransom of half the treasury of Britain — unless it’s that we’re pretending the United States and Russia are launching nuclear attacks at each other and then we will profit from the ensuing anarchy after the phony exchange leads them to launch a real one (I did have a briefing, but now I can’t remember what the plan was) — and now we are in our undersea cavern and waiting for the clock to tick down to either launch our bombs or have the ransom deposited in our Swiss bank account, depending on what our plan is. We have our U-boat parked here and the two bombs safely packed away somewhere. Our fort is, of course, impregnable. We have steel everywhere. The architect who made it has been executed and all the workmen given blinders so that they can only work on their corner without knowledge of the base as a whole — and then they too were executed just to be on the safe side. We have abundant caches of automatic weapons. We have a mad scientist with an Eastern European accent — I think it’s Hungarian, although Sod, who has an excellent ear, claims it’s actually Polish — who has assured us that the plan is entirely foolproof. We have been issued cute blue outfits with yellow sashes, which are unorthodox and have provoked some surprise, but when you have been in black turtlenecks and leather jackets as long as we have, a dash of color really goes a long way. And we have time to burn.

I have, I would say, an excellent crew at the moment, as good as it’s ever been. Sod is with me, practicing his hat trick and the golf ball-crushing trick and keeping up with his martial arts in a way that would put so many of my former colleagues to shame, and our Polish scientist has a shock of hair shooting straight up and a gleam in his eyes that makes it very easy to trust him, and for our resident heavy, we have Jaws, who is about seven feet tall and has a mouth entirely of metal, and while it is very difficult to watch him eat, he is actually delightful company once you get to know him and can be teased, which is a rare quality in a heavy, and we have the goons, who have been training every day under my direction, and the shark is a hammerhead, not unfortunately a Great White due to some budget cuts, but very scary-looking and the screams of the embezzling accountant who was tossed in made us all feel that it could do the job, even on something of a shoestring, and we have Lana, who always makes the place better even if she’s mostly been tucked away in Blofeld’s quarters.

It's cozy, I would say, that’s the word that comes to mind, and coziness has an interesting way of interacting with rumination. If I think about Hans, who had the handcuff tying him to the pretty girl unhooked from him just before he could reach his detonator and who then tumbled off the rooftop screaming in German, it doesn’t quite give me the same cold feeling that it does if I’m in the vault of a multinational and the vigilante is prowling around the air ducts almost exactly in the same way that he did when he got Hans. Now, if I allow my mind to wander there, I can more or less forget about the plummet from the tall building with the detonator finally going off in mid-air, and I can appreciate Hans for what he was — the well-fitted suits, the rumbling accent, the really impressively detailed plan, the ruthless execution.

Sod seems to be in a similar state of mind. He has bought a series of bobblehead dolls that he has lined up on a shelf on the other side of the room and he is decapitating them one-by-one with a throw of his top hat.

“Sod,” I say, “what are you thinking about?”

He hates when I ask him this. He flings the hat using two hands in the way that he’s been practicing so that to my eyes it looks as flat as a frisbee but it doesn’t smoothly decapitate the Joan Crawford bobblehead he’s aiming at, instead the head just tilts to one side and Sod grunts to himself in guttural Korean as he goes to retrieve the hat and then bring it back to try again.

“I’m thinking about my father,” he concedes at last.

Ah.

“I’m thinking that there’s a lot about this that I can’t figure out on my own and it would be nice to just ask him but I’ll never have the opportunity,” he more or less says. Sod has been working on a sort of whispery lisp that makes him very difficult to understand, but he hates it when I ask him to repeat himself so I usually have to just kind of piece together his meaning.

He readies his hat and this time he takes off the rest of Joan’s head with irreproachable precision.

“You knew him,” he says.

Did I? It seems impossible, that I was working with Odd watching him practice his hat trick in a lair very much like this and here I am with his son, but it seems Sod is right.

“What was he like?” he maybe says although it’s really impossible to tell with the lisp.

“He was uh. Well, the golf ball trick was really extraordinary. We used to all gather around to watch him do that, but then at some point it was just a thing he did, the way some other guys might pick at their teeth, or snap a rubber band. He’d be standing there glowering at Bond tossing a golf ball and the next thing you knew it was smithereens in his hand.”

Sod turns his torso and takes off Lana Turner with a neat stroke.

“It doesn’t seem possible,” he very likely says. “I’ve been practicing and practicing.”

I watch him sweep Lana into the dustbin and then line up the next round of bobbleheads.

“But what was he — ” Sod says, “when you were sitting around with him in the lair like this, what was, what did he talk about for instance?”

This is work for me, it’s very different from being in the car or the vault and trying to remember the grisly death of the second-story man. “He was very big,” I say. “He was very powerful.”

“Yes.”

“And I’m pretty sure he never spoke.”

Sod is in his windup and he pauses. He puts the hat down and adjusts his suit vest. He seems crushed. “Never?” he says.

“I don’t think so. I think it was all grunts. It was very intimidating.”

Sod sits for a moment. He strokes at the wisps of hair that are a year or two away from turning into a Fu Manchu moustache. He puts his head between his hands and presses at the temples.

“That must have been something,” he says.

“You definitely knew when he was around,” I agree. “It was a very heavy quiet.”

Sod has, I’ve always felt, been very emotional and as he presses hard with his knobby palms into his temples, I think I can see the glint of a tear in his eyes.

“It must have been amazing,” he says and lets the pause deepen. “I have to kill Bond,” he adds, and he has forgotten to lisp so what he says is crystal-clear.

I wait for him to elaborate, but he seems to have decided to let the silence stretch. He sits with head clasped and then very slowly and, this time, absolutely wordlessly, he gets up and continues his training. As impressive as this is, it gets a little tiresome, so I wander out and stroll around the lair. It’s always a mistake to tell people too much about their fathers, I think, they always end up feeling they have a lot to live up to, and for one thing they always end up thinking that they have to be the one to carry out the revenge when it’s Blofeld who already has the foolproof plan for them to follow.

I stand along the bannister and look down. A few of the maintenance goons are carrying fueling rods, or something or other, to and from the submarine. The blue uniforms with the yellow sashes are really, I think, an excellent idea. The thick plastic suits that the maintenance goons are always wearing might be good for radioactive material and that sort of thing but if a martial arts fight should happen to break out, this kimono-ish aesthetic will give them a lot more flexibility. On the wall, by the external control panel, an impressively stern techie is pressing buttons. The clock above him is counting down ten hours until the launch — unless it’s the deposit in the Swiss bank.

There’s not really a lot to do. Small-arms drill isn’t for another couple of hours. The shark has only recently been fed. This would be a good moment for Lana to stroll around the bannister in something sheer and to poutily take in her domain, but she doesn't. The U-boat has brought mail on its last trip in and she’s probably reading a magazine.

There seems to be nothing for it but to visit the accountant’s office. Boorstin is there at his little fold-out desk tapping into his spreadsheet.

“How you holding up?” I say.

“Alright Banx, alright.”

He really isn’t in very good shape, Boorstin, very skinny and slouchy, with an unconvincing combover and a leer.

“You set back at all not having your number two man?”

Boorstin has a habit of never looking at you when he speaks to you and always speaking out of the side of his mouth. He’s very busy every time I come in, which I find impressive, because nobody else has any idea what it is that the accountants do.

He nods at me to sit next to him on his work bench. His breath smells of the fried onions that the cook has been just pouring into our food.

“To tell you the truth Banx,” he says, “it was me that was embezzling not him — ”

“I thought he looked a little shocked when the chute opened and he was dumped in.”

Boorstin shrugs. “I don’t think it was that. I think he just wanted to argue his case.”

“You’re lucky it all happened so fast.”

Boorstin has an enviable ability to keep typing at his spreadsheet whether or not he’s looking at it, and his eyes, including the lazy one, roam around the ceiling as he types and speaks.

“I don’t think you really understand Banx,” he says. This is his favorite mode of conversation. “Blofeld knows perfectly well that I’m embezzling — and my number two also knew that I was embezzling and that Blofeld knew I was embezzling. Blofeld just wanted to send a message to me to knock it off and that’s the way he likes to do it. There was nothing that my number two could have said to make Blofeld change his mind. I think he just didn’t want to be fed to the shark.”

“Well, why not just speak to you and let you know that he knows and that you should knock it off? Why get your assistant involved at all?”

Boorstin finally stops typing. He looks at me and, with some effort, his lazy eye finally finds mine. Out of habit, he does a scan for cameras but nobody ever bothers with the accountant’s office.

“Banx, I’m really amazed at how long you’ve been in this business and how little you know.” Most accountants I know speak in a hiss, and Boorstin for a while was doing this, but thank god he decided to just speak normally and rely on a slight over-enunciation to achieve his intended effect. “We are under a mountain of crushing debt,” he says, “just staggering, planet-tilting, unimaginable debt — ”

“How?” I say, genuinely shocked. “All we do is steal, murder, extort. After all that, how can we possibly be in the hole?”

Boorstin raises one eyebrow significantly. “Look around you,” he says. “You think rock-hewn bases come cheap? You think cute blue-and-yellow uniforms in matching sets of 200 — ”

“Which are fabulous.”

“You think that they can be picked up at Goodwill? These are costs, Banx, overhead, plus the salaries for your team, plus Lana’s dresses, plus the general lifestyle of it all, the jetskis and the BMWs and the yacht and the Bathosub — ”

“There are savings everywhere,” I point out gently. “I strangled the architect with my own hands and used his fingerprint to tap into his account and wire his salary back to us — ”

When Boorstin is not being preemptively dismissive, he likes to feign exasperation. “Pennies on the dollar,” he says. “I don’t think anybody in your department — or any department like it — can imagine what it takes to run an operation like this one. Nobody can really, except yours truly, and Blofeld knows that and that means that however strict his organization he has to make an exception as far as accounting is concerned — ”

“Apart from your assistant.”

Boorstin has reverted to preemptive dismissal. “He has to send a message one way or another,” he says.

This is the way it always is with Boorstin. None of the other goons like to spend their time with him — and, from a personal appearance point of view, he really could use a lot of work — but I always leave these meetings with a very particular feeling. It’s the peculiar combination of a tingling in my scalp and a stone sinking in my belly. On the one hand, Boorstin never exactly gives good news — there’s none of the sunny optimism that we always have in the map room or with the exfiltration and assassination teams as they set off for their missions — but, on the other hand, there’s the very distinctive sensation of the membrane of my scalp giving way and my mind expanding. And it really is astonishing, come to think of it. All those ransoms, all those architects asphyxiated and their fingerprints shoved onto their own personal devices, all those banks with somebody like Jaws shooting a gun into the air and shouting something cowboyish while our inside man cravenly presses a pistol against the teller’s ribs, and I never once stopped to think about all the red tallying up on the other side of the ledger.

I am, I am well aware, not as indispensable as Boorstin, and I lean in tightly to whisper my next question. “Are we going under?” I say.

I suppose Boorstin must enjoy it that I can somewhat speak the language of accountants — otherwise he would have kicked me out of his office long before now — but, as a habit, preemptive dismissal dies hard with him. He sneers with his top lip.

“Nothing for you to worry your poor head about Banx,” he says. “We’ll carry out this operation and it’ll wipe out most of our sunk costs. We’ll be able to keep the roof over our heads here, maybe even build another lair somewhere else.”

“I thought this operation was about tricking the United States and the Soviet Union into a nuclear exchange.”

Boorstin gets that look where he freezes up. “You really need to be more attentive,” he says. “This operation is about ransoming the two atomic bombs back to Great Britain and covering a few of our expenses — ”

“Ah I see.”

“Maybe next time,” he says generously, feeling, I think, sorry for me that I allowed myself to fade out of attention during the briefing. “We pull this off and then the next time we steal an atomic weapon we can think about really using it.”

I nod. I seem to have run out of questions. With Boorstin, there’s always layer after layer, it’s like if you know the right button to press he can rock your world in multiple dimensions, but he never really volunteers if you don’t know what to ask him. He’s gone back to typing Greek symbols into his spreadsheet.

“If they don’t pay, we do have to launch, right?”

“That’s true,” Boorstin says gently. “There’s always the possibility that we’re obligated to launch.”

Link to Chapter II.