The Star Ruby Contract, page 1
The Star Ruby Contract
A Joe Gall Mystery
Philip Atlee
Chapter 1
The jetliner came out of a blue Pacific infinity and broke its glide path over the runway, which looked like a freeway, abandoned halfway across the harbor. I listened to the clamor of hydraulic systems and felt the trucked wheel assemblies take the weight of the big aircraft. Heat waves came shimmering up past the windows as we rolled with diminishing speed. After more systems had grunted and squealed, we taxied to a halt, but I did not unbuckle my seatbelt until the other passengers were trooping off.
Kai Tak Aerodrome had been improved since the last time I had seen it. The new runway, reclaimed from the harbor by a tremendous amount of fill, was far safer than the old facility, with its dangerous letdown over the hills.
When I stepped out of the plane, the sultry afternoon hit me in the face. Pausing on the ramp, I glanced across Kowloon Peninsula to the incredible green shadows on Victoria Peak. It was wreathed in fog, but between the drifting patches were remembered grandeurs, the faded pastel mansions of the taipans, the narrow roadways, and the summit tram. And beyond them, on the other side, Aberdeen, Repulse Bay, and the wonderful floating restaurants …
“Have a nice stay, sir,” piped one of the pretty stewardesses, and I nodded and went down the ramp. I had been holding up the show; the trim girls had laughing assignations to keep. Black-uniformed customs and immigration officials with silver insignia were as polite as ever, flipping through my passport and papers.
They said, “Welcome to Hong Kong, Mr. Mallory. In transit, are you? Fine, sir, enjoy your visit.”
In half an hour I had recovered my baggage, endured the buffeting tourists, and by a naked show of wealth snared a cab. This was not as easy as it sounds. An unruly mob was milling around before the terminal entrance, chanting and brandishing placards. The demonstrators seemed to be of many nationalities, colors, and ages and had obviously been bit by some dread tarantula. They were waiting to unload their spleen on a U.S. dignitary, and their legends exhorted all Yanks to go home, especially those in Vietnam.
They were strident about it, impeding traffic, but I skirted their dancing madness and found the greedy cab driver. Rode away from the tumultuous terminal building without learning the result of their organized hubbub. It was far too hot for that kind of nonsense, no matter what moral values were involved, and their strange devices couldn’t apply to me because I was a Yank who had just left home.
In another twenty minutes I was following a room boy down a spacious corridor in the Peninsula Hotel. After I had tipped him well, he informed me that I couldn’t have a bath for two hours, smiled blandly, and withdrew. As I unpacked I was smiling, too (faintly) because some things hadn’t changed. There was still a water shortage in Hong Kong after all the years, and the room boy hadn’t told me about it until I had tipped him.
The sequence of these events may be the key to Asia. Whisky I could have, however, so I rang the bell and had some.
I was sitting downstairs watching the big lobby bar fill up when somebody clapped me on the shoulder and a deep voice said, “I warned you long ago that you’d keep ramblin’ till the wine turned to vinegar—”
“Potts!” I turned to shake hands with Hal Pottschmidt, a bulky Dutchman who could make the most expensive white sharkskin suit look like a hand-me-down. Potts was a former chief pilot of CNAC and CAT and had been flying in the East for nearly thirty years. His sandy, unruly hair was now a graying fright wig, but he hadn’t changed much otherwise.
He was with a small mob of Aussies and New Zealanders, and as he introduced me they responded with slightly inebriated candor, their ladies being even more horsefaced than I remembered. They had just come in from the race course at Happy Valley and were surging toward the bar to stoke inner fires before proceeding to dinner. I responded to their good-natured raillery with short answers like “rooster’s ass, cobber” and “so many descendents of convicts!” Nobody even noticed.
I was invited to join their swinging company but declined, and as they surged by I asked Pottschmidt to come up to my room for a minute before he left for dinner. He winked and went rolling after them, white jacket bunched up on his big shoulders. As I finished my drink, I saw the boisterous group create space at the bar by main force and heard them bellowing at the bartenders.
I was sitting upstairs in the room, going over some frayed linen flight maps of Southeast Asia, when Potts knocked on the door. When I called, he came in, and I fixed him a burrah-peg drink of Scotch. Grunting thanks, he dropped into one of the big leather chairs.
“Long time since you’ve been on the Kowloon ferry, Joe,” he said. “Have you missed the town?”
“Certainly. Everybody does. But my name’s Mallory, now. Okay?”
“Unhunh …” Potts drank half the glass of Scotch and swirled the rest of it. “Charley Farrell, one of my pilots, went back to the States last year to pick up a new plane for us. Plane wasn’t quite ready, so he took off for Mexico City. Says he saw you there one midnight, in the Nicte Ha Bar, with the most beautiful Negro girl in the world. Had bright red hair, yet, Charley says.”
A tic hit me over the right eye, as if someone had yanked out a wild hair with a two-inch root. “I have some business in Mexico, once in a while,” I said, pressing at the throbbing place. He was talking about Jannina, the fine blackbird who hadn’t come home at all. And never would …
Potts was chuckling. He finished the drink and held the glass toward me. “Everybody in the world flies through Hong Kong, Joe,” he said. “Sooner or later … And we hear that your business is extensive …”
I took the glass and was turning away toward the bar when he added, “Matter of fact, we hear that you must be the biggest spook—”
Freezing, with my back to him, I whipped my fingers in a short arc across my throat. It was the old signal for “aircraft correctly parked, cut your engines,” and Potts picked it up smoothly.
“… reports from Cairo, Barcelona, so I figured you were in some kind of import business …”
“That’s right,” I said, and took him another glass of Scotch.
He cradled the glass in his big, weathered hands. The hail-fellow, jollytime attitude was gone, and he waited quietly. I fixed myself another drink and went back to sit opposite him.
“I want some news circulated, Potts,” I said. “I’m going back into Burma in a few days to take over their civil aviation operation. Air Burma, the transport services, everything. And I’m interested in hiring pilots. European, Anzac, or Asiatic—anybody with some time, a multiengine license, and an instrument card. They get paid a flat three thousand a month up to one hundred twenty-five hours, fifty dollars an hour after that. Expenses and three months guarantee …”
Pottschmidt’s eyes were narrowed, deep in wind wrinkles. “You did that before. Seventeen years ago. Only then you were flying military charter, too …”
“That’s right. This time I won’t control military aircraft.”
Potts sipped his drink slowly because he was faced with something he didn’t understand. For two and a half decades he had been paying the cumshaw and taking the shake in the Orient, after coming in for Claire Chennault on a passport that said “farmer,” and now he wanted some bona fides.
“I think you’re lying, Joe,” he said. “In forty-nine you went in and gutted the Burmese treasury of every dollar, Swiss franc, and pound sterling in it, at the highest charter price ever paid in aviation history. The country was newly independent then, and shaky, but it ain’t that way now. General Ne Win is a bulldog, and Burma’s been closed airtight to Americans for several years …
I got up and went to the teakwood bench at the end of the bed, unzipped my map case, and returned to toss the contract in his lap. He folded back the long top sheet of pale green, with the rampant golden lions and the Great Seal of the Government of The Union of Burma on it, and read through the document slowly. Glanced up at me, and read it again.
“This should make you a popular man,” said Pottschmidt. “How long will you be taking applications here?”
“Four days.”
He shook his head and handed me back the contract, signed by General Ne Win, dictator of Burma. The document hired me as Managing Director of all Burmese flight services, with full authority to hire and discharge all personnel.
“Will you see that the news gets around, Potts? Beginning tonight? I mean to Bangkok, Calcutta, Karachi, Singapore, Melbourne, Sydney, and all way stations …
“Right.” He hesitated. “At the price, Joe, some of these jokers might peel off regular airline jobs, and some of them have families here and there.”
“I won’t take that kind.”
“Good.” He belted down the rest of his drink and stood up. “I’d better catch up with those digger friends of mine … Don’t know why, though. I invariably have to whip one of the bastards before dawn, or run like a coward …”
I knew what he meant. Australians are what Yanks were fifty years ago; they are not rich enough yet to be neurotic, but they’re working on it. In the meantime, they just tee off on the nearest hostile object.
Potts stood fidgeting with his glass. He was half-drunk and ready to leave, but he couldn’t figure out what to do with the glass. That was strange, because his deft touch as a navigator was legendary. Celestial contact, anyway. But among the groundlings he kept pawing at his disordered hair and wrenching his clothes out of shape in aimless indecision.
The seamed face was somber, and the keen eyes steady on me. “I thank you for the drinks, but I’m afraid you’ve moved slightly out of my sphere.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. Burma’s closed so tight that Ne Win’s even ordered the few remaining missionaries out by the end of the year. People who’ve lived there sixty, seventy years. Yet he seems to have given you another key to their treasury.”
“That’s right.”
“Okay.” Potts held up his big hands in surrender and lumbered toward the door. He looked like a glistening-white, untidy bear.
“I need something else, Potts,” I added, and he stopped with one hand on the door knob. “I need a perfumed quiff. A Eurasian girl under twenty, beautiful and with the morals of an alley cat. Educated. Someone who will hang steady, for enough money, as long as I want her.”
The big man facing the door didn’t move, and the air conditioning hummed. There was something else in the room, too—a queer emotional electricity.
“You had that once before,” Pottschmidt said, and threw his head like a gaffed fish. “Someone like Ugette?”
“Just like that,” I said.
He nodded. “You’ve always had the best of it, haven’t you, you dirty bastard?” he asked quietly. Since he didn’t use profanity often, I knew he was listening closely.
Pottschmidt had never married. He was a drinker and a party-type fellow and, in spite of looking like a used-clothes hamper, had been attractive to women and known a lot of them. A long time ago he had found a fifteen-year-old girl named Ugette dancing in a joint on Bubbling Well Road, in Shanghai. A young Venus with black nipples, just out of Hanoi.
Tar-brush, sure, but with an incredible figure and a classic face. So he had shacked up with her, after paying $17,000 key money for an elaborate Calcutta apartment. Then one bright summer day I had played tennis with them, and a week later Ugette had moved in with me, in an apartment for which I had paid plenty of key money. We had been happy for a year, and I had even taught her to shave her armpits before I left Asia in disgust at the tactics of Chancre Jack’s government.
A pilot named Nash had inherited her, and they had stayed together until I returned a few years later to run air operations in Burma, which was finally free of English rule. Ugette had been killed by a Karen grenade just before I left Burma. Potts had been on the periphery of these events, but not near me.
Her accidental death had been, as the English say, deeply regretted by all ranks. But she was gone now, and she had never been anything but an attractive object, like a Playboy bunny. More available, of course, but still, dead …
“I’ll try to find a suitable replacement,” said Pottschmidt heavily. “One to fit your high position. But don’t leave the replacement in Burma, too.”
“We take these chances, Potts,” I said. “And I know you’ll do your best because we are blood brothers in the Seonee Wolf Pack. In the locust years when I was a scared young copilot checking out on four-engine equipment, you used to whipsaw me brutally. And then, one dim monsoon afternoon, at the end of the Kunming runway, I hauled your charred ass out of a plane that had crashed on takeoff.”
“Yes,” said Pottschmidt, “there’s always that. I’ll have some candidates drop by in the witching hours. Now would it be all right if I got a breath of fresh air?”
“Certainly,” I said. “Thanks for dropping by.”
Chapter 2
Two hours later I was bent over the desk again, concentrating on strip maps of the Shan States, when a tap came on the door. I reached for my robe, and went to open it. A young Eurasian girl in a tailored suit was standing in the hall, with some kind of briefcase under her arm, and she asked if I was Captain Mallory.
“Yes,” I said, and motioned her in and to a chair. She was tall, and her ebony hair was teased high, combed full in back. The straight lines of the severely tailored suit could not conceal her figure, and her long legs were admirable. While I sat waiting, she rummaged in the briefcase and handed me several papers.
One of them was a certificate of graduation from the Academy of St. Cecilia, another to show that she had completed a secretarial course at Lindsay’s Business School, Hong Kong, and the third was her Hong Kong police registration, with a thumbnail picture affixed in the upper right corner.
“Captain Pottschmidt sent you?” I asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“You know, then, that the job involves going to Burma for several months?”
“Yes, he told me that.”
I gave her back the papers. “I don’t have much correspondence. Mostly, I require a traveling companion— one who can do this or that, immediately, when I point Somebody who won’t argue, or foul up.”
“I understand,” she answered.
“Good. Are you a virgin?”
“No.”
“Would you like a drink of champagne?”
“Always and forever,” said the dark-eyed girl, clapping her hands. “Whatever hour.”
“This,” I said, pressing the service button, “is whatever hour, and I often have champagne when it comes around.”
When I thumbed the cork out of the first bottle of Bollinger ’59 Brut, she watched it hit the ceiling and clapped her hands in delight again. The hands were long and shapely, and had dark half-moons in the nails. We chatted idly through the first bottle, and she seemed to know her way around Hong Kong. She had worked for six months in an import-export house in Seoul, had left there because of the cold, but had liked their pickled kimchi. She could do the American dances, she said, Frug and Watusi and the rest, but was uncertain about the thigh-length dresses from London. In her opinion, the Cheongsam gowns of the Orient could show as much, and you could still sit down in them.
Just table talk …
After we had opened the second bottle, I asked her to dance for me. She got up and went thrusting through a passable imitation of the frenetic idiots locked in smoky New York caves. Since she did it without any music, I was interested.
“Solange,” I said, “the job I have will keep you away from home for a while. You will live well, but there may be danger, and, when I have problems, I am sometimes rough as a cob.”
The girl had fallen back in her chair, laughing, and there was a film of perspiration on her upper lip. “Cob? What is it? I am not so rough as that, am I? I know I cannot dance like my sister, but she trained for many years …”
What with whisky in the early afternoon, and champagne on top of it, I seemed to have missed a key remark. “What in the hell has your sister got to do with it?” I asked, and Solange straightened up, wide-eyed.
“I thought Captain Pottschmidt told you. I am the sister of Ugette.”
“Are you, now?” I asked.
“Yes. It was always a great thing when her letters about you came to our home in Hanoi.”
“She didn’t tell me,” I said. “Neither did Potts.”
“Not so? Oh, yes. And there are two sisters younger than I still there.”
I considered this information at some length, and poured her another glass of champagne. She took it like Pepsi-Cola, and I went to the bathroom. When I got back, she was curled up in the big chair again, and had unbuttoned the jacket of her tailored suit.
“Solange,” I said, “you have two choices. Either take your convent diploma and go home, or go into the bathroom and have a good wash. All over, and then get into bed.”
“I’ll bathe,” said the tall girl cheerfully, and whirled up out of her chair. I had a glimpse of shapely legs as she turned, and then she was in the bathroom, trying knobs and humming in French.
Soldier, I thought wryly, this is your night for being reminded of old loves … Potts had done it inadvertently about Jannina, dead in Mexico, and now this girl, a sister of the dark Venus who had been killed in Rangoon.
I hadn’t known Pottschmidt was so hung up on Ugette. Christ, in those Shanghai days we were all going full throttle and changed girls like we changed flying jobs. That didn’t alter the fact that sending her younger sister to see me hadn’t been inadvertent.
Then I listened to the happy splashings in the bathtub, and wondered how much wood could a woodchuck chuck? Perhaps this one would be an immortal love, too. Couldn’t tell, certainly, until we tried …
