"Very good." He extended the Handbook to me. "There is here a picture which calls itself Millen Carmody. Is that the man?"
I glanced at the familiar warm eyes on the frontispiece. "That's right. Have you seen him?"
"I have, indeed." The shaggy beard was twitching—I did not know whether with laughter or the coming of tears. "I saw him not long ago, Weels. It was in what they call Bay 100—you remember? He was in a little bag like the pasta one carries home from a store. He was quite sound asleep, Weels, in the shelf just below the one I woke up in."
XV
So now at last I knew why Millen Carmody had permitted Defoe to turn the Company into a prison cell for the world. He couldn't forbid it, because the dead can forbid nothing, and Carmody was sleeping with the dead. No wonder Defoe was so concerned with the Naples sector!
How long? How long had Carmody been quietly out of the way, while Defoe made his plans and took his steps, and someone in a little room somewhere confected "statements" with Millen Carmody's signature on them and "interviews" that involved only one man?
It could not have been less than five or six years, I thought, counting back to the time when Defoe's name first began to register with me as an ordinary citizen, before I had married his cousin. Six years. That was the date of the Prague-Vienna war. And the year following, Hanoi clashed with Cebu. And the year after that, Auckland and Adelaide.
What in God's name was Defoe's plan? Nothing as simple as putting Carmody out of the way so that he could loot the Company. No man could wish to be that rich! It was meaningless....
Defoe could be playing for only one thing—power.