She was interrupted by a skeleton. A skeleton in a Dior dress, with tanned skin stretched almost to snapping point over the delicate bones of the skull. The skeleton had long blond hair and perfectly made-up lips: she looked like the person mothers around the world would point to, muttering, “That’s what’ll happen to you if you don’t eat your greens”; she looked like a famine-relief poster with style.
She was New York’s top fashion model, and she was holding a book. She said, “Uh, excuse me, Mr. Sable, I hope you don’t mind me intruding, but, your book, it changed my life, I was wondering, would you mind signing it for me?” She stared imploringly at him with eyes deep-sunk in gloriously eyeshadowed sockets.
Sable nodded graciously, and took the book from her.
It was not surprising that she had recognized him, for his dark gray eyes stared out from his photo on the foil-embossed cover. Foodless Dieting: Slim Yourself Beautiful, the book was called; The Diet Book of the Century!
“How do you spell your name?” he asked.
“Sherryl. Two Rs, one Y, one L.”
“You remind me of an old, old friend,” he told her, as he wrote swiftly and carefully on the title page. “There you go. Glad you liked it. Always good to meet a fan.”
What he’d written was this:
Sherryl,
A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley
for a penny, and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.
Rev. 6:6.
Dr. Raven Sable.
“It’s from the Bible,” he told her.
She closed the book reverently and backed away from the table, thanking Sable, he didn’t know how much this meant to her, he had changed her life, truly he had. …
He had never actually earned the medical degree he claimed, since there hadn’t been any universities in those days, but Sable could see she was starving to death. He gave her a couple of months at the outside. Foodless. Handle your weight problem, terminally.
Frannie was stabbing at her laptop computer hungrily, planning the next phase in Sable’s transformation of the eating habits of the Western World. Sable had bought her the machine as a personal present. It was very, very expensive, very powerful, and ultra-slim. He liked slim things.
“There’s a European outfit we can buy into for the initial toehold—Holdings (Holdings) Incorporated. That’ll give us the Liechtenstein tax base. Now, if we channel funds out through the Caymans, into Luxembourg, and from there to Switzerland, we could pay for the factories in … ”
But Sable was no longer listening. He was remembering the exclusive little restaurant. It had occurred to him that he had never seen so many rich people so hungry.
Sable grinned, the honest, open grin that goes with job satisfaction, perfect and pure. He was just killing time until the main event, but he was killing it in such exquisite ways. Time, and sometimes people.
SOMETIMES HE WAS called White, or Blanc, or Albus, or Chalky, or Weiss, or Snowy, or any one of a hundred other names. His skin was pale, his hair a faded blond, his eyes light gray. He was somewhere in his twenties at a casual glance, and a casual glance was all anyone ever gave him.
He was almost entirely unmemorable.
Unlike his two colleagues, he could never settle down in any one job for very long.
He had had all manner of interesting jobs in lots of interesting places.
(He had worked at the Chernobyl Power Station, and at Windscale, and at Three Mile Island, always in minor jobs that weren’t very important.)
He had been a minor but valued member of a number of scientific research establishments.
(He had helped to design the petrol engine, and plastics, and the ring-pull can.)
He could turn his hand to anything.
Nobody really noticed him. He was unobtrusive; his presence was cumulative. If you thought about it carefully, you could figure out he had to have been doing something, had to have been somewhere. Maybe he even spoke to you. But he was easy to forget, was Mr. White.
At this time he was working as deckhand on an oil tanker, heading toward Tokyo.
The captain was drunk in his cabin. The first mate was in the head. The second mate was in the galley. That was pretty much it for the crew: the ship was almost completely automated. There wasn’t much a person could do.
However, if a person just happened to press the EMERGENCY CARGO RELEASE switch on the bridge, the automatic systems would