The Skeleton Coast Contract, page 14
“Official business,” announced a voice I did not recognize.
I flipped another switch that floodlighted the front gate for twenty seconds. “Come in, latch the gate behind you, and follow the lighted path through the trees. Understand?”
“Right,” answered the voice, and in a few minutes the front door chimes sounded. The visitor was not a courier, however; he was a tall, lean man who looked like an aging golf professional. His name was Burt Holroyd and he was Tokyo station chief for the agency. A long time ago we had both flown the Himalayan route during World War II.
We shook hands and I told him it was a treat, because it was. Holroyd was one of the few really good pilots I ever knew who went on to an important administrative job. He had two fair things going for him—dignity and integrity. When he was settled in a leather chair beside the fireplace, I hustled up a tray with potables, ice, and chasers and we skoaled each other.
Then we had another drink and surveyed each other in reflective silence. Marking what the years had done and remembering those incredible days when the wind whipped snow-plumes off the high peaks… Holroyd didn’t ask to see the house or garden, and if he cared about my health, he kept it to himself. I can stand a lot of that.
When I asked if he could spend the night, Burt said no. He had a rented car down at my gate and after we got through our business, he was driving on to catch a coast flight in Tulsa. He had been on a ten-day emergency leave in Washington to get an impacted wisdom tooth yanked out by the ankles, and would fly straight on through to Japan after we had talked.
“Dinner, though?”
“That I’d like,” he said, and I left him to commune with the Black Daniels and the flickering log while I went to the kitchen and got two Chateaubriand prime steaks ready for the broiler. Then I returned to the living room, had another shot neat, and asked if he wanted to start, or should I?
“Guess I should, since I brought you into it.” Holroyd was staring at the beamed ceilings, fourteen feet high. “Nice little lean-to you got here. Have you turned all the way queer or just animist?”
Laughing, I choked on my chaser and had a coughing fit.
“Don’t misunderstand,” Holroyd said with great sincerity. “It’s just that I keep waiting for Mussolini to walk in.”
“You miserable sod, the last time I saw Mussolini was when you were wearing that solar topi at midnight, in the Calcutta whorehouse. Giving away buckets of hard-boiled eggs, hollering that they were reverse lend-lease.”
“As, indeed, they were,” said Holroyd. “I had paid American cash for the goddamned things…”
After our remembrance of those bawdy times had gone up the wide chimney like dying sparks, he told me about his end of the curious assignment I had been considering for nearly a week.
Slouching back in the big leather chair, long fingers steepled at his chin, Holroyd said that his Tokyo headquarters office had begun getting feelers eight months ago. All indirect. Some through the Japanese seaports, the underworld, and even one through the German Embassy. An American bully-boy was wanted in Djakarta. Somebody willing to take a big chance for the right price.
Burt added that his office got such second-hand feelers all the time. They were processed routinely, if perfunctorily, to see if they might be linked to something important. This particular attempt at recruitment was interesting only because an American had been specified. Indirectly, his office had put up a barfly Yankee scrounger who was about to be deported from Japan anyway, and this candidate made the necessary contact in Kobe and promptly vanished. Period. Had not been heard of since.
In three weeks, however, the recruiting effort was on again. This time, however, the price was up to $50,000, and the shadowy recruiters had gone to the center of the Tokyo underground, to the vice lords and pachinko kings.
“It still had to be a glorified smash-and-grab deal,” said Holroyd, leaning forward to pour a drink. “A smuggling effort. But we couldn’t just ignore it, not when we didn’t know what had happened to the first candidate. So we gave them Lad MacBride. Remember him?”
I did. Lad had been a general’s aide during the Korean War, more truculent than talented, and afterward had hung around Hong Kong too long. He never understood, even after the transition was obvious, that a white man was no longer important in the Orient just by standing there and showing off his Caucasian characteristics. MacBride had kept sinking in the scale, taking one off-color job after the other, and the last I had heard of him he was doing a six-year jolt on Formosa for smuggling narcotics.
Holroyd said he had put MacBride in the line of inquiry, and Lad had grabbed at a fee that size. They must have paid him a sizable advance because he moved out of his Hong Kong burrow into a suite in the Peninsula Hotel and, after a series of roaring parties, flew to Djakarta.
He didn’t last for the handshake. Three days after arriving in Indonesia he had been gunned down on the busy street running in front of the USIA Library building in Djakarta. From a truck. No truck can race away very fast in the traffic along that street, but this one had not been apprehended.
Holroyd shook his head, thin mouth working with distaste. “The dumb bastard was wearing his expensive custom-tailored sharkskin silk shorts and jacket, as usual. I know, because I flew over to have a look at him in the morgue. Still had that supercilious smile, too—you remember? Like he couldn’t stop to talk to you because he had a tea-date, right now, with Jesus Christ Almighty.”
I nodded.
“Besides his wounds, which were numerous, all he had on him were a wallet with nearly $12,000 in assorted currencies and one of those squeeze-bottle sinus remedies. We put everything through the lab. Turned out to be not quite routine. The three-odd ounces of fluid left in the squeeze-bottle weren’t put in it by the manufacturer; they tested out as puromycin, an experimental antibiotic.”
Holroyd had immediately sent everything, all of Lad MacBride’s remains and artifacts, to the Washington laboratory of the agency. And forgotten the affair.
Until, three months later, like an exposed nerve end that would not stop twitching, the attempts at recruitment began again. This time at even higher levels, with the price raised again. This time it was up to $80,000, one half promised in advance. That bothered Holroyd. A delegation from the World Bank was expected to visit Djakarta soon.
He cabled Washington that it might be a good idea to check this persistent effort out, and recommended that a professional contract agent be put on the job. He suggested that I was the logical man because I had worked in the area before, etc. End of the first part of the story. Later, when his aching jaw had driven him to Washington for relief, Neal Pearsall had told him that I was partially briefed, and would he fly to St. Louis and then drive down to contact me before returning to Tokyo?
Neal Pearsall was the director of the agency’s action division, so when he suggested something, we did it as a matter of course. We didn’t have to, of course, because we were all free men, working for a democratic, if subterranean, organization. Those who didn’t follow Neal’s suggestions soon found themselves still free men but unattached to that particular part of our democracy.
Two
It was my turn. I said that most of what Holroyd had told me had been forwarded by courier, together with several ounces of the puromycin and some blurred but legible photocopied notes recovered from Lad MacBride’s room in the Hotel Indonesia. (Burt’s men, in theory, should have been working closely enough with the Djakarta station chief to have known about these notes, but I did not linger on that angle. )
The notes had obviously been part of a laboratory evaluation on widespread human tests in Japanese prisons, using puromycin. They were startling and, when coupled with the notes on American laboratory findings, astonishing. Pearsall had sent me these American notes after having his own central lab reidentify the substance and checking it out with Dr. Carlo Ravich in Berkeley. Dr. Ravich was the agency’s principal consultant in this field.
He, in turn, had referred Neal to the leading American investigators of puromycin, Drs. Samuel Barondes and Harry Cohen. Both these researchers worked in the MacLean Hospital Laboratory, Belmont, Massachusetts, and were affiliated with the Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School. Explaining to Holroyd that their notes were mostly too deep for me but that I had tried to capsule them to the layman’s level, I went to the desk and got my cards.
“Male Swiss albino mice (thirty to forty grams, Charles River Breeding Company) were used. Both puromycin and cyclohexamide are inhibitors of protein synthesis. However cyclohexamide-injected mice gave hippocampal region recordings of electrical activity not distinguishable from mice injected with saline solution alone. The puromycin-injected subjects gave strikingly abnormal recordings.
“Mice injected with puromycin five hours before training learned to escape, or avoid, shock. Injections of puromycin into both temporal regions of the brain inhibited more than eighty percent of protein synthesis, for from several hours to more than half a day after medication.
“Possibly puromycin has a direct effect on the electrical activity of the brain. It certainly has an amnesiac effect when administered to mice, either before or after training…”
I tossed the note cards on the teakwood coffee table and looked at Holroyd. Sprawled on his shoulder blades, he shrugged.
“Beats the hell out of me, pappy,” he commented. “I got about a third of it.”
“Okay.” I nodded. “Something new and very powerful. Something that induces short-term, or ‘labile,’ phases of memory-storing.”
“Sure,” he said.
“The notes found in MacBride’s room indicated that large-scale human Jesting had gone on. I called Dr. Barondes, in Massachusetts, and discussed it with him. He agreed that a number of Japanese scientists were working on the same subject and might have progressed to human tests. But he had not read any literature on it.”
Holroyd nodded and we continued to discuss the experimental drug while I put the steaks on. After we had eaten them, we settled back with a brandy and two of my twisted cheroots.
“The rest of it is in here,” Burt said, pulling a thick envelope from the inside pocket of his jacket. Leaning forward, he dropped the envelope on the edge of the coffee table. “Except that I found out last night, before I flew to St. Louis, who is floating all the bait, from inside Indonesia.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. A Lieutenant Colonel Abdul Hatta.” He heaved up, a lean man with his hands spread in inquiry, and I showed him out to the hall and flipped on the toilet lights. Going back to the living room, I took the littered plates out to the pantry.
When Holroyd returned from the toilet, I was reading through the dossier on Colonel Hatta for the second time. He was thirty-seven and bore a famous name; his uncle had been, with Sukarno, one of the great Indonesian leaders and patriots. The nephew, however, seemed a much paler carbon copy. He seemed never to have had an important command or staff job, although he had once been detached to serve as operations manager of Garuda Airways. It was not stated, but this indicated that he was a pilot. He had been posted to Sukarnopurna once but seemed a minor figure getting by on the strength of a famous name.
His latest, and by far most important, duty was to act as liaison officer between the UNESCO restoration mission at Borobodur and the Indonesian Government. Borobodur was the tremendous Hindu ruin, a terraced shrine that was collapsing because of water-weakened foundations. The work on its restoration was estimated to require at least three years, and UNESCO had allotted $4,000,000 and an international staff to the project.
The photographs of Colonel Hatta were not impressive and I marked him fop. He was a slender man with a slight moustache and in the candid shots he sported an impressive array of teeth. I looked over at Holroyd.
“No earthshaker, on the strength of this,” I commented, and Holroyd shook his head.
“No, but we can’t find where he fits. A pretty good swordsman, works his way through one legong dancing group after another, but his allegiance is obscure. We can’t tell who is moving him.”
“And Borobodur, the restoration?”
“Your cover. You’ve got a supporting passport in the report there, as chief PRO officer of the project.”
“That’s nice,” I said. “Would you like to capsule Indonesian politics for me, as of now, in a few minutes?”
“Why not? Bung Karno, the handsome little man in the black velvet cap, is still riding high. But he operates by whim, playing us off against Peking. He has tapped every available foreign till, by threats and charm, but charisma alone won’t pay the bills. The Soviets sold him a fleet of overaged naval vessels and stung his ass good on the price. Then they repented and built him a big sports stadium and complex, including barracks and an adjoining airport, for nothing.
“So then he switched to Tokyo. He’s just juggling, to try to induce more offers, but seems to be sliding to the left. Eight months ago he denounced the United States as leader of the NEOCOLIM group, which translates to neocolonialism and imperialism. Doesn’t really favor either side, of course, because he is a classic example of megalomania. But between Nasution, his chief general, and Aidit, leader of PKI, the Indonesian Communist Party, the left is winning.”
“Okay.” I poured him another brandy. “About his private life.”
“Gaudy, man!” Holroyd shook his head. “As the disgruntled old uncle said, if you split his head with an ax, all you’d find would be pubic hairs. He tours the world on chartered jets, and host nations throw willing girls at him like you’d slop a hog. In spite of serious kidney trouble, he keeps grunting and humping. There was a story from Vienna last year that he raped a fourteen-year-old girl.
“Jusuf Muda Dalam is Governor of the Indonesian State Bank, and Sukarno pays the women through him. Tens of them, hundreds of them, sluts and ladies of high rank. The formula is fairly simple and completely criminal, of course. Bung Kamo follows what must be a permanent erection: when he has finished with one of his important mistresses, he sends her along to Banker Dalam, where she acquires credits and import permits worth tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars. These official favors can either be discounted for cash or used to bring in scarce goods. On one deal we know about, Sukarno himself issued a special deferred-payment license to import ten million dollars’ worth of yarn. The man who bought it paid him six hundred thousand in cash.”
“How long can he keep that up?” I asked.
“I don’t know, Joe,” said Holroyd wearily. He got up and reached for his raincoat. “With all his gutter affairs and all his contradictions, the handsome little man still controls the fifth most populous nation in the world. And great states can forget a lot when they are contending for the support of a stake that big. Thanks for the steak and the booze.”
I switched on the indirect spotlights framing the path to the front gate and walked him to his car. As he ducked into it he said that he would not contact me after I reached Tokyo but that I had his unlisted telephone number. He would help when he could. I nodded, thanked him, and watched his scarlet taillights recede down the narrow dirt road.
Three
In the envelope Holroyd had brought me there was more literature on puromycin and a new United Nations passport with my picture in it. The passport stated that my name was Herbert Peavy Broderick and that I was a public relations officer attached to the Paris office of UNESCO. Also included were inoculation records and several packets of currency, U.S. and Asian.
I read the medical reports twice, but there was little new in them. An appended note from Pearsall said that no literature on human tests with puromycin had appeared in Japan. That didn’t fit the notes found in MacBride’s room in Djakarta, but I reflected that such wide-scale tests, in prison, might be classified by the Japanese Government. The zaibatsu swung a pretty big stick in national policy, and the new antibiotic might have industrial or military applications.
For the next hour I sat in my study writing routine notes, transferring bank accounts, getting my affairs in order. It was the same for every trip, and I had reduced it to a minimum. Fearing that the cold rain might have kept the tigers from hunting, I went down to the basement walk-in cold room and got as much chopped horse meat as I could carry in a burlap bag.
By the light of the concealed spots I humped the meat across the arched bridge and dumped it on the frozen ground before the black limestone figures. Went back to the house and stood waiting on the terrace.
An hour later I heard a low snarling across the pool and saw an incredible frieze.
Three white tigers. Standing motionless in a flood of moonlight, framed by the black bamboos. The male was poised in front, one snowy paw lifted, big head up. The tigresses were at his flanks, their narrower heads lowered. They were looking across the dark water at me, and I stared back.
The male tiger rumbled again, lowered his paw, and the snowy trio paced on across the garden. Unhurriedly, moving with cushioned ease through the moonlight, up toward the waterfall.
I didn’t view the new contract with much relish. When you are young and boisterous, you can stride the world in all weathers, breaking noses and swaggering like a bravo. Considering my past, I reflected that I had been a lot like the experienced whore; she didn’t need to go get a thing, it was always right there with her…
But that was a good many wounds and dubious victories ago, when I had never even checked the weather. Now I wanted to know about the storm ahead; I had been out in too many ill winds.
In the Canary Islands I had sweated through the dusty leviche blowing off the North African deserts, and in France been chilled by the mistral. In Mexico, diamond-eyed on heroin, I had watched a hurricane level miles of towering palms like toothpicks, and adrift on the open sea beyond Tahiti had turned my back on the man-made blast from the French hydrogen-bomb test. In the Andes it had been the cloud-shrouded buffeting of the zonda.
