Victim Prime Read online

  “Are we there yet?”

  Just then a tired-looking steward in a soiled green jumpsuit made an announcement over the crackly public-address system. “Ladies and gentlemen, if you’ll look out the right side of the plane, the island of Esmeralda is now in view.”

  Through the scratched Plexiglas Harold could see an island, dark against the bright mirror of the sea, growing in size as they approached. Its hills were clad in pine and scrub oak, and its black sand beaches were frothed by a thin line of breakers. Far in the distance Harold thought he could make out the hazy coastline of another, bigger island. “What’s that over there?” he asked his seatmate. The beefy man squinted and shrugged. “Hell, that’s Haiti.”

  The jet descended rapidly over Esmeralda and began the turn that would take it to Morgantown Airport on the side of the bland fronting the Mouchoir Passage.

  The seat-belt and no-smoking signs came on and the stewardess announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, we will be landing in Esmeralda in a few moments. Please extinguish all cigarettes. Thank you. And enjoy your stay in Huntworld.”

  11

  It was a pleasant and efficient airport, bright and shiny, in stark contrast to Miami’s. Palm trees in pots, low ceilings with fluorescent panels, pastel colors. Vaguely Caribbean murals on the walls. Customs and immigration were swift but thorough. They didn’t seem to care much about who came in. Harold’s suit, dirty and sweat-stained, didn’t even rate a glance from the neatly uniformed policeman who waved him through with the rest of the passengers. And there he was, just like that, in Esmeralda, home of Huntworld.

  He made his way through the crowded airport to the taxi and bus loading areas outside. There were about a hundred people waiting for transportation. Harold shouldered his knapsack and walked away from the crowd, hoping to find a ride into the city but planning to walk if necessary. He had gotten halfway around the building when a low white open sports car stopped beside him.

  The driver said, “If you’re going into Esmeralda, you’re walking in the wrong direction.”

  “Well, hell,” Harold said. “How about giving me a lift?”

  The driver swung the door open. He was a big, tanned man, almost as big as Harold but a lot better-looking. His face was classically Italian: olive-skinned, with melting brown eyes and a dark stubble on his well-shaven chin. He wore a camel’s-hair cashmere sports coat and a pale blue paisley ascot.

  “Come here to Hunt?” he asked.

  “I’m considering it,” Harold said.

  “Permit me to introduce myself,” the driver said. “I am Mike Albani. Everybody knows me. I am a first-class Spotter.”

  “A Spotter? What’s that?”

  “I thought everybody knew about Spotters,” Albani said. “We’re what you might call the Hunter’s advance men. We provide whatever you need: cars, weapons, ammo, and above all, information. We set up your kill for you, or figure out who’s after you when it’s your turn to be Hunted.”

  “What do you get for that?” Harold said.

  “All it costs you is one quarter of your Huntworld advance plus expenses. Believe me, it’s worth it. What are you going to do, buy a telephone book and a roadmap and try to Spot for yourself? Who’s going to set up your safeguards, figure out the enemy’s defenses? That’s my job; I’m good at it. So if you do decide to Hunt I’d like to recommend my services. I can be hired by the hour, day, or duration of the Hunt.”

  “Thanks for telling me that,” Harold said. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

  “Maybe you’d like to see our famous sights? I also arrange scenic and nightlife tours.”

  “Do I look like I’m ready for a nightclub?” Harold asked.

  Albani had taken in Harold’s cheap heavy smelly serge suit and clumsy workboots still caked with red Georgia mud. “I thought you might be an eccentric. Sometimes they’re very wealthy.”

  “If I was a rich eccentric,” Harold said, “I’d dress just like you.”

  “Maybe you’ll strike it rich, who knows? Hunting pays well. Where can I drop you?”

  “I don’t know,” Harold said. He had thought he’d go straight to Nora’s address, but now he decided against it. He had about a week’s whiskers on his face and his body was damned near as grimy as his clothes. “Where can I get a cheap hotel?”

  “The Estrella del Sur, right in the heart of downtown. Costs just a little more than some of the South Dockside places, but at least they don’t rob your room. Not while you’re awake, anyhow.”

  “Thanks, that’s good to know,” Harold said.

  They were on a four-lane highway crossing a flat plain. There were souvenir shops and flat-roofed factories along the road. Billboards advertised hotels, restaurants, suntan oil, cigarettes. Palm trees here and there reminded you that you were in the Caribbean. It was the biggest show of prosperity Harold had ever seen, outside of television programs that showed you how things used to be in America before the bottom dropped out of everything and Mother Nature pulled the plug. Soon they were in the city of Esmeralda itself. Harold was amazed by the cleanliness of the streets and the lack of beggars.

  “People look pretty prosperous here,” Harold said.

  “We get tourists year-round. Esmeralda is very popular among Europeans, and even Asians are starting to come now. It keeps the economy going.”

  “You get that many people coming here to Hunt?”

  “Oh, most of them say they’re just here to watch.” Albani smiled maliciously. “They’re not planning to kill anyone. Oh, no, they just want to visit this quaint island where men wear weapons and duel and Hunt each other. They want to watch safely behind the bulletproof windows of our cafés and restaurants. So they say. But it’s interesting how many of them end up joining the Hunt. Something in the air, I suppose. Good thing for us, too, all those people coming here to kill each other off. The island would be depopulated in a year if the Hunters weren’t regularly replenished from the outside. We don’t have much of a birthrate, you know. People don’t come here to raise families.”

  Albani pulled to the curb in front of a four-story building that had seen better days. A faded sign on its front said it was the Estrella del Sur.

  “Have a nice stay,” Albani said. “And if you decide to Hunt, anyone can tell you where to find me. I’m the best and I work cheap.”

  12

  Esmeralda was a long low island near Great Inagua in the southeastern corner of the Bahamas, almost within sight of Haiti. In 2021 a bankrupt Bahamian government had sold the island, sovereignty and all, to a group of international investors with headquarters in Berne, Switzerland. It seemed a reasonable move to the Bahamian government of General Lazaro Rufo, whose government, recently established by coup d’etat, was desperately in need of hard currency. What did one island matter, especially a barren one like Esmeralda, when you had seven hundred others to worry about? The price was right and the island was worthless.

  It was worth plenty to the Huntworld Corporation, an international consortium of wealthy men dedicated to the sound principles of profit and quick turnover. Murder was the ideal product, even better than drugs, since the users supplied everything—their lives, their guns, and their deaths. Murder, when done in an orderly and businesslike manner and only with consenting parties, was even socially acceptable. And it had obviously great potentiality as a sport for people who had tried everything else.

  Although many governments had expressed an interest in letting Huntworld operate on their territory, the corporate heads of the Huntworld Corporation decided to put it on a country of their own. They would avoid problems with government by the simple expedient of being government. And as a further inducement to investors, they would collect taxes instead of paying them.

  From its inception, the Huntworld project was imaginatively conceived and well funded. The island’s shabby little capital of Morgantown was torn down. An architectural master plan for a complete new city was drawn up and carried out in record time. The new city of Esmeralda was no
t the usual steel-and-glass rabbit warren that the modern world had developed in its long struggle to free itself from any hint of good taste. The plan for the city of Esmeralda was frankly medieval and didn’t even have a space allocation for a shopping mall. About half of its buildings were made from a light-colored rock mined from calcareous deposits on the island. But major structures on the island like the Hunt Academy and the Coliseum were built of imported limestone and Italian marble. From its very beginning Esmeralda looked like a graceful old colonial city, vaguely European in appearance, a Renaissance city springing up like a fata morgana on the low coral surface of Esmeralda.

  The tranquil tropical island with its beautifully sculptured and well-antiqued city was a prime tourist attraction all by itself, even without the added incentive of legalized murder. You could come to Esmeralda and enjoy the glamour of the past, but with all the convenience of the fun-loving present.

  Not only did Huntworld provide fun and danger in a setting of great natural beauty, it was also a place for the contemplative scholar. It had a world-famous museum of Assyrian and Hittite antiquities, purchased entire from a bankrupt England and shipped to Esmeralda to add a little class to the operation. It had a well-funded Oceanographic Institute that rivaled Monaco’s. And there were the famous resorts, the Rockefeller Hilton, the Holiday Ford, the Dorada del Sur, the Castillo, the Cantinflas; and the golf courses, the tennis courts, the unrivaled underwater fishing, the cuisine from five continents.

  And if you didn’t happen to have the price of a first-class vacation in your electronic bank account, Huntworld had a cut-rate nonstop carnival village at DeLancy’s Beach on the southern tip of the island. This was where the renowned Saturnalia began each year, Esmeralda’s own unique version of Carnival or Mardi Gras.

  The final ingredient in the mix was the Hunt, that peculiar institution in which men risked their lives against each other in accordance with a minimum of rules. The Hunt was a sort of controlled lawlessness, a celebration of the darker emotions. What you could do legally in Huntworld was precisely what the world had been trying to get rid of since the beginning of recorded time. Without success.

  Although a lot of the world was in bad shape, Huntworld was doing just fine. People came from all over to witness the debasement of its morals and the miracle of its favorable balance of payments. Murder was always good business. Huntworld also dealt in sex and drugs, thus completing its investment in the things men treasure.

  In the rest of the world, men distrusted change and shied away from novelty. Fashion had disappeared. The arts had become almost exclusively interpretive rather than innovative. People tended to look alike and act alike. Conformism was in. The sciences had suffered a decline. Medical science had changed since its Faustian days in the twentieth century. Doctors no longer tried to preserve individual lives indefinitely. Now the goal was to keep as much of the dwindling, disease-ridden population going as possible.

  In theoretical physics, there hadn’t been an important new cosmological theory in over a hundred years, and no new subatomic particles had been found in the last thirty. Science was stagnating for lack of funds, and there was no objection to that in the world at large. People thought it was nice to have science slow down for a while. Everyone knew that science was dangerous. It was science, after all, which had brought the atom bomb and all the other troubles out of its Pandora’s box of bright ideas. Maybe it was time to put a moratorium on bright ideas, time to stop trying to improve things, or even learn things. It was time to keep your head down.

  The current quietistic period in world affairs came about as a result of the nuclear war between Brazil and South Africa in 2019. Who could have predicted that a dispute over fishing rights in the South Atlantic would result in a war that would directly or indirectly kill some twelve million people on two continents and very nearly pull the entire world into self-destruction? The present era of stagnation dates from the conclusion of hostilities between the South American Federation, that gaudy but short-lived brainchild of the ideologue Carlos Esteban de Saenz, and Greater South Africa under the black ruler Charles Graatz.

  The Fish War, as it has been called, came to an end on June 2, 2021, with the sudden and still-unexplained death of Saenz. The dictator’s death, hours after the end of the second nuclear exchange between the two nations, put the South American ruling council into disarray. The long-planned interdiction of the Zambesi basin had to be postponed, awaiting the emergence of a new chief of state. This presented an unequaled opportunity for the South Africans.

  But the unexpected occurred. With his enemies’ forces temporarily out of combat, with a chance to press his advantage home, Charles Graatz of South Africa confounded everyone. Instead of taking advantage of the situation, he unilaterally suspended hostilities and disclaimed any further interest in the disputed fishing rights.

  He was quoted as saying, “Trying to find an advantage in a situation like this is madness. Why kill the world over a mess of fish? If no country can step back from the brink except when decisively defeated, war will be perpetual and everlasting. Speaking for my Zulu constituency, and for our white, black, colored, and oriental minorities, I say, if it means so much to them, let the South Americans have the fish.”

  The South Americans, under newly elected General Retorio Torres, were not to be outdone on a point of pride. Torres declared that the fishing dispute had been a matter of principle rather than of fish, but that pride was a still greater principle than Principle itself. Not to be outdone in reasonableness, he suggested that they let the UN handle this one.

  The crisis ended so quickly and unexpectedly that the world was caught in the curious position of having no other immediate crisis upon which to go to war. Nor was any country quick to fill the crisis gap, as it came to be called. Against all expectation, there was peace.

  People were tired of the long tension of living on the brink of annihilation. The excruciating questions of nationality, race, religion, politics, social theory, and political power seemed unimportant in the face of the new universal imperative: Don’t Rock the Boat.

  Finding itself, accidentally, as it were, in a state of peace unprecedented since the beginning of civilization, the world at large decided that it was a good time to let everything stay just the way it was, a good time to stop pushing the dear old national interest and let some of the radioactive waste laid down by the impatient twentieth century get rid of some of its leaking half-life without adding more to it.

  It was time to let up on the atmosphere, time to give the planet and everyone on it a chance to breathe.

  Time to hold fast, rest easy, just stay in your places.

  Out of this arose the period of peace called, variously, the Truce of Exhaustion, the Time of the Great Stagnation, and the Beginning of the New Dark Ages.

  One odd statistic showed up. It seemed that men of prime age, the young men who were no longer being killed in the flower of their youth in one senseless war or another, were, many of them, seeking other ways of getting killed.

  It was almost as if a part of the population found it necessary to kill itself off periodically, if not for one reason, then for another, or for no reason at all.

  It was irrational but inescapable. How else to explain the great prosperity of a place like Huntworld?

  13

  Just as he was about to enter the hotel, Harold heard people shouting, heard the quick slap of running footsteps. He looked around and saw a man running down the sidewalk toward him. Twenty feet behind, another man was chasing him. The second man had a gun.

  As the first man rushed past Harold, the second man fired. Harold, pressed back hard against the wall of the hotel, heard something fly past his right ear and chunk hard against the granite. A bullet had missed him by less than an inch. He looked at the chipped place on the wall. Pursuer and pursued hurried past, into a side street.

  Harold went into the hotel and up to the desk. The manager, dark-skinned and white-haired, wearing soiled whi
te slacks and a T-shirt, looked up from his newspaper. “Five dollars a night in advance,” he said. “There’s a bath in the hall.”

  “I almost got killed out there,” Harold said.

  “Can’t be too careful around here,” the manager said. “The traffic is atrocious.”

  “No, it was a bullet.”

  “Ah, Hunters,” the manager said, waving his hand in a gesture that might have meant “Boys will be boys.” “You want a room? Sign in here.”

  The room was small, white-curtained, reasonably clean, with a single bed and washbasin. There was a french window with a view of a cobblestoned plaza with a statue in the middle of it.

  Harold took his knapsack and went down the hall to the bathroom. He bathed and scrubbed himself clean, shaved, then washed his suit and changed into jeans and a blue workshirt. He went back to his room, found hangers, hung up his stuff to dry.

  There was a telephone in the room. Harold took the slip of paper with Nora’s telephone number out of his worn wallet. He had to go through the hotel switchboard, and it seemed to take forever, but at last the call went through.

  “Nora? Is that you?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Guess.”

  “I don’t want to play any games. Is this Frank?”

  “Goddam, Nora, you mean to tell me you really don’t know who this is?”

  “Harold? Is that really you? You’re here in Hunt-world?”

  “I guess I am,” Harold said.

  “But how did you … never mind, we can talk about it later. Want to come to my place for a drink?”

  “Does a pig like to wallow?”

  “You come on over.” She gave him directions.

  Out in the streets the crowds were dense and the air was filled with the smell of frying spiced oil, roasting meat, sweet-sour wine, and faintly, persistently, cordite. The people he passed were unbelievable. They were wearing, among other things, furs, bathing suits, Greek tunics, Roman togas, Renaissance headdress, American Indian loincloths, and Turcoman robes. There were other costumes Harold could not identify. This was a pretty funny place, just like people said. But it was a prosperous place, and Harold liked looking at that. He had never seen such a clean shiny place before. There were trees planted along the sidewalks, and it was nice looking at trees again. He’d heard there was a whole forest on the island, and he wanted to see it.