The Paper Pistol Contract, page 2
“Grave worms,” she said, looking down at me. Her eyes were smoky in the faint illumination from my lighter. “Orohena House was one of the wonders of the Pacific when my father built it. Rosewood, mahogany, ironwood, teak. But he made a mistake, you see. He built it on a Tiki site, a morae. And now the grave worms have taken it over again.”
I snapped the lighter off and stood up. Several hundred yards across the wide expanse of what had been a lawn once, was a riding ring and a stable that must have been able to hold a hundred horses. At one end of it, in what must have been the tack room, a sliver of lamplight showed.
“Ah Chee,” she said. “But he won’t hear us. An old man, deep in his opium dream by now. He keeps a few cattle, and writes to me when one of them dies. When he can remember.”
Beyond the stable was a pier, its warped boards curling up, and we stood looking at the lanes of silver shimmering on the sea beyond it.
The lady seemed to be casting up her accounts. “I had to prove something, I suppose,” she said slowly. “That I was not a benighted Polynesian savage. But I go quietly crazy in Cleveland. When it gets too bad, I catch a plane to New York and usually there’s a hula-girl show somewhere. Most often at the Lexington Hotel. So I take it in every night for a week, go backstage to talk with the girls, and then I fly back to Cleveland and tough it out a little longer.”
I didn’t say anything, and we watched a school of small fish flit quicksilver lanes along the water.
“That’s all,” she said. “I wanted to get you out of your split-level comfort one time so that you could see something besides the free harlots and Quinn’s Bar.”
I unscrewed the cap from the rum bottle, and had a large belt. When I handed it to her, she shook her head. “Goddamn you,” I said, “take it, or I’ll leave you here with the grave worms!”
She laughed, but not much, had a drink from the bottle, and then we started walking away from the starlit ruins of Orohena House. Once she stumbled, and I caught her and found that she was crying silently. So I gave her a good slap on the ass—not a love tap but a stinger—and another drink. Then she flared and tried to hit me, and I got both her hands but dropped the bottle. Both of us started laughing, and when I recovered the bottle from the mud, most of it was spilled.
When we were back at the car, I opened the door on the driver’s side, had her sit down, and washed off her feet. We had no water, but the rum did fine, soaked in a towel. Putting her sandals back on, she complained that her feet were sticky, and I asked sternly what the hell did she want. She was probably the only girl on the island getting loaded through the toes. That made her giggle, and I got in the front seat beside her.
“Thank you,” she said, as she leaned over to kiss me. “My name is Odile.”
“God bless Odile,” I said. Then I slipped her halter down and nuzzled her firm breasts. Deep-throated, I announced that if the night of the poltergeists was over, if we had seen enough of her past, perhaps we could have an impromptu ball and pitch a small bitch. Named Odile, and what else was new on the island?
She giggled again, and I knew I was in like Flynn. We had another touch from the bottle, and I was thinking now, Captain Bligh? when she suddenly shoved me away. “Let’s go swimming,” she said.
“Okay.” I straightened, and she switched on the car lights and laughed when she saw the distress I had in smoothing out my pareu. We went roaring back through Papeete and turned off the highway and up a narrow side road. Trailing vegetation kept scraping at the car, and we came out finally in a small, high clearing. She switched the lights off, and I saw the pool and heard the waterfall. As we got out and went toward it my eyes focused, and I saw water pluming down from the rocks in a forty-foot fall.
The air was much colder, and I thought we must have driven up eight or nine hundred feet. Odile paused on the rocks that rimmed the pool and gracefully shed her pareu and halter; then, naked and entirely lovely, she dived in. I followed, and gasped when I hit the icy water. We swam like antic otters, wreathing around each other, sometimes embracing in a kind of arctic passion. After fifteen minutes of it, I went flutter-kicking back to the rocks through clinging watercress. She came after me, and I bent her back and kissed her breasts again; they were like cold bronze.
After I had gotten another towel from the car and dried her back, I felt newborn. The rum ran down my throat and exploded nicely. Odile had a drink, too, and calmly announced that the pool we were swimming in was the official water reservoir for Papeete, and that anyone caught swimming in it was fined $1,000.
“Up and out, by the numbers!” I said briskly, hauling her to her feet and grabbing her pareu and halter.
“Who’s awake at this hour?” she protested, laughing. I said no matter; my company had spent three years working on the deal, and all that was needed to queer it was my getting hauled in for late licentious bathing and contaminating Papeete’s water supply. She was still laughing as I carried her over the rocks to the car.
When we were inside it, shivering but cured of the grave worms at Orohena House, I took her by the shoulders and explained that I had been content in my house, reading blueprints and scheming, until she came along and changed from Mrs. Aloof Gebhardt, from Cleveland, to island sprite Odile. Now, if she pleased …
She smiled, started the car, and drove back down the mountain. We hit the highway and turned south, and she went humming by my bungalow, and then hers. I was not exactly neglecting anything because the damp skirt and halter were clinging to her closely, and I was making sure that every tuck was in its proper place.
She turned off the highway several miles past her house after we had gone crunching over a few thousand crabs, and we drove up another side road. A bulldozer had been at work on it for several miles, ripping away the reddish volcanic soil. Then she stopped and said we had to walk the rest of the way. She said that her brother was developing the high hillside and selling lots on it, but that there was a bungalow above that the family had used for years.
We ducked through and around the lush growths and finally came out into another clearing. The bungalow was there, and it had a magnificent view across the bay toward Moorea. We went inside, and I could smell an air of disuse, but the place was well furnished. Odile explained as we stood in the musty room that the electricity was not turned on. She showed me one of the bedrooms, and it was simple but well-appointed. So everything was perfect; we had a hidden place to make love in (a handsome bed was only a few feet away). But I stood there not noticing her. Listening. For some reason, it seemed to me that the house on the high plateau was listening too.
A gentle rain began to fall; it sounded loud on the tin roof. I turned and led Odile out of the dark bungalow and across the lawn. Put her down on the wet grass and made sudden love to her in the misty rain. Neither of us spoke, only coupled in urgency.
She gasped, and then exploded under me. When I leaned up and off her, she cried, “Don’t move!” and I whipped around. The only thing within ten feet of us was a bush with arching white fronds, looking like a stilled waterfall in the dim light.
“The white bamboo,” she explained, lying on her back. “It stings, hurts for a long time. Don’t touch it.”
“Thanks,” I said, still kneeling. She twisted out from under me and began demonstrating the tamure, the ancient sex dance. Her naked body undulated as she enticed me, the warrior, to draw nearer and nearer as she went quivering backward and downward until her head touched the ground. The warrior, it seemed, then threw his spear, driving it into the ground between her spread legs. Then, said Odile, moving back up rhythmically, she kneels before him and—
Something moved beyond the white bamboo. As she bent forward I lunged to one side, jerking her off balance by the hair and an arm. Three gouts of flame blossomed from the window of the left bedroom, the one we had not entered, and something slammed me so hard on the back of my right shoulder that I was driven to my knees in the muddy turf. Odile must have been hit, too, because she screamed with pain and didn’t stop while I was dragging her behind the white bamboo and into the dripping brush.
Two more blasts came from the window, shredding foliage over our heads, and then there was no sound but the whispering rainfall. Odile tried to move and whimpered once before I slapped her into silence. Then we listened again. Blood was running down my right thigh, and I flexed my right shoulder cautiously; it twinged, but it worked. Putting my mouth close to Odile’s ear, I said I wanted her to get up and run like hell down to her car. Making all the noise she could, enough for two people. Then to get in the car and gun it down to the highway toward her house.
“Leave you here?” she asked, looking up at me, startled. I nodded and clamped my hand over her mouth.
“At home, park your car where you usually do. Go inside and go to bed. Okay?”
She nodded and took a deep breath. With my left hand, I helped her up and she took off, running low, a naked and glistening dryad. She slashed at the branches with her sodden pareu; and made enough racket to be heard from the silent and darkened bungalow. As I circled through the dripping brush around the bungalow, I heard the urgent, tinny hum of Odile’s Simca as she drove it down the rutted road.
Crouching in the misty darkness at the edge of the bungalow yard, I could make out two faint footpaths. The one on the far side led up into the rain forest, higher on the mountains, and the one I was crouching by turned down toward the road. I couldn’t cover both, so I stayed where I was. A half hour went by, but nothing moved inside the bungalow. Shifting my bare feet carefully, I knotted the pareu around my right shoulder to try to stop the flow of blood down my back. The shoulder was aching badly, and I was wondering if I was on a bum stakeout when a figure in a shapeless hat stepped out on the bungalow veranda.
He stood above the glistening steps with the shotgun canted at ready and surveyed the yard slowly. Then he stepped down and started toward me, his sandals sucking at the muddy lawn. When he was half a step past my hiding place, I took him. My left hand got the shotgun barrel and when I bladed his throat with the outer edge of my right hand, he crumpled noiselessly and slid to the ground.
Ejecting the three shells from the gun swiftly, I swung its butt like a club and smashed his larynx so hard that I could hear bones pop like castanets. The shotgun was a ten gauge, and I used a corner of my pareu to wipe my prints from it. With my foot, I kicked off the soaked straw hat and saw that our unsuccessful assassin was Chinese.
Kneeling, I looked the body over as carefully as I could in the dim light. The broad face was nondescript; the dirty singlet, shorts, and thonged sandals were what the island laborers wore. There were no surgical scars on him; his teeth were stained and jagged, with no evidence of dental attention, and his hair, as with so many Chinese laborers, seemed an untended pelt. There was one unused shell in his pocket, but nothing else. No money, cigarettes, matches, personal effects. He had been sent out clean.
After I had dragged his body back about fifty feet farther into the heavy underbrush, I dropped the shotgun beside him and went down the slippery clay road toward the highway. The rain was still pouring down when I reached the highway, and I struck out through it toward my own bungalow. When cars approached from either direction, I plunged off the highway and hid in the lush growth.
Skirting the yard of my bungalow, I entered it from the back. As I stood under the fresh-water shower, chains of reverberating thunder shook the dark sky over Tahiti, and lightning slashed through the heavy downpour. When I had toweled off, I checked the house and found the rented boy sleeping peacefully in his bedroom. A fine thing, I thought, looking down at him, this sleep of the just.
Chapter 3
Sitting in my study in the darkness, listening to the rain fall in solid sheets, I meditated on how happy Odile Gebhardt and I had been together for a while there. It was quite possible that I was a blown gosling, with my effectiveness at an end, if I could be set up that easily. Almost contemptuously.
On the other hand, I knew nothing about the lady but that she owned the house down the road, and Richard’s encounter with her son had seemed very impromptu. Still, I couldn’t be sure, and my pareu was soaked with blood—my own.
After half an hour of reflection, I decided that I must have been the target and resolved to break radio silence. Because as Mr. Johnson (Samuel, not Lyndon) said, nothing concentrates the mind so wonderfully as the threat of imminent death.
The portable tape recorder I had brought with me from the States was a miracle of microcircuitry and miniaturization because, while it was a recorder on top, it was also a superb shortwave radio transmitter and receiver. After I had unlatched the cover and reset the dials, I depressed the mike button.
“Calling Warlock,” I said, “this is Riff-Raff calling Warlock, Riff-Raff to Warlock. Do you read me?” While I waited, the carrier wave hummed, but no answer came, so I called again.
This time the answering voice was brusque and so loud that I reached hastily for the volume control. “This is Warlock. We read you loud and clear, Riff-Raff. Go ahead.” Then the voice clicked off and I cut in again.
“We may have a May Day here,” I said. “Can you put Captain Blanchard on?”
“Right,” said the speaker, and after a few seconds, Blanchard answered. I explained briefly what had happened and asked who our most important compartmented contact was on Tahiti. Blanchard said he didn’t know, but could have him alerted. When did I want to see him? I switched on the desk light long enough to look at my watch; it was nearly 4 A.M.
“Better make it this afternoon,” I said into the mike. “I was seen riding with her, and somebody may be by to talk to me. How about three this afternoon?”
“In Quinn’s Bar,” said the receiver.
“Recognition?”
“Standard Four, for the day.”
“If I get jammed up before then, will you be monitoring this same frequency?”
Alan Blanchard snorted through the receiver. “Did you have any trouble picking us up this time, old sport? The launch will pick you up on the point at seven tonight. Warlock over and out.” His wave clicked off, and I reset the tape recorder and buckled it back up. Knowing that I couldn’t use it again from that location, I walked back to the front of the house.
I sat in the living room and listened to the rain some more. Holding the paper pistol in my lap, I thought about how sodden the unknown body must be getting, sprawled near the lawn on the high plateau. With the last blood draining out of it. The pistol was feather-light, a new issue in the agency. I suppose you could call it instant firepower because it was extruded from impregnated paper pulp in one operation, with the eight-shot clip molded into it. When the clip was empty, you threw the thing away.
Admittedly not much for the gun collector, the paper pistol had definite advantages in my work. If I could not get out of any given jam with eight shots, I probably wasn’t going to get out. I was an action agent, not a spy, and there is a difference. A spy skulks around, and tries to buy people and documents. He tries to get information (not previously known) that can be collated with something else to form a conclusion. I don’t do that; I just change situations, sometimes forcibly.
The former head of the agency I worked for under contract had put it well. He said if you influence a man to tell you something important, that is intelligence; if you steal the same material while he’s out of the room, that’s espionage. I was in neither category. After about twelve years of service, and after being bounced off the civil service list of the agency, I was a nullifier, a strong-armer at the outermost periphery of the friction between great states.
During War the Deuce, I had been Marine Corps issue until I got an ankle hemstitched by machine-gun fire on Iwo Shima. The field station hung a tag on me that read, “Gall, Joseph Liam, Type O, 101128, Major, handle con cuidado,” and shipped me to the hospital in Klamath Falls. There, more doctors clucked, scraped, hammered, and sewed for seventeen months, and then announced sternly, like a demented military chorus, “this one won’t work. He’s busted.”
They were wrong. After I had sweated my guts out and caused some unsightly brawls to keep them from taking the foot off, I finally got back the use of it. The ankle was still badly scarred, and I would never again be able to take a button-hook pass in an enemy backfield, but it was stout enough for what I had to do. (And, incidentally, always get at least five opinions; too many of those surgeons will look at an interesting case and chop a limb off for practice.)
When I got out of the hospital, a dapper little man named Howard Shale recruited me for the agency. I have been in the line of fire, in two wars for this republic, and I think Shale is the only real patriot I ever met. He got killed shortly before the Diems did when his helicopter was shot down in South Vietnam, and that is the worst trade this country ever made.
When Shale bought it, I was no longer a member of the varsity. My work had been satisfactory; I once flew to Teheran with $1,000,000 in cash and delivered it to a mad mullah to keep the world safe for consortiums. I flew a got-to-lose Colonel into Guatemala in a B26, and we hustled Jacobo out. West Wind, the Berlin tap, and the bad mistake with the anti-de Gaulle generals in Africa … I was either in, or in the pipeline near the center on them because, after all, the Hoover Commission had recommended that we take bolder action on the operative level.
We did, and often did not trouble to tell the U.S. State Department, whose obstreperous baby we were. And why should we tell them? We had over 40,000 people and a larger hidden budget than they did. So we romped across the earth, often being directly addressed as “Sir Spook” by newsmen on the Champs Elysées, the Paseo de Garcia, or along Nyhavn, in Copenhagen. And a good many newsmen addressed a good many newsmen as “Sir Spook” too, and a tremendous flood of books, articles, and news stories went out as our plants.
