My son the double agent

SPIES HAVE MOTHERS TOO!

...and Steve Victor's mother worried!

Steve couldn't understand why. After all, everything was normal . . . normal for Steve Victor, that is. He had a new top-secret assignment from the highest levels of the United States government. As usual, it was on a “take it or else” basis, the enemy’s aim was world domination, and he was totally on his own, without even a hope of assistance if he goofed. What could be new?

Well . . . maybe life was a little tougher than normal. The enemy had even greater resources and fantastic weapons than usual. Even more women than usual were giving him the runaround. Then, too, he was facing a rap for a murder he hadn't committed. And there seemed to be a clever Romeo who was his exact double committing all sorts of dastardly acts which he was getting blamed for... .

Oh, P.S., Mom; He lost this pants!

MY SON, THE DOUBLE AGENT

Ted Mark

1966

Dear Mom:

Why haven’t I written in so long you’re ashamed to face the neighbors? Trouble—that’s why! Double trouble! Now, don’t panic. I’m all grown up now and I have to cope with my problems myself. So please don’t hop the first plane to Malta, you’ll kiss it and make it better. You’d only complicate things, and they’re complicated enough. And don’t get your feelings hurt, either. Look at it from my point of view. It’s not easy being an overprotected spy!

But there is one way you can help me. Think back over the years to when I was twins. I hate to bring up the tragedy, but it could be important. Now, as you told me the story, we were twin baby infants and one of us drowned in the bathtub. (Down in my Freudian subconscious, I’ve secretly never been sure which one. I know you said it was my brother, but who, today, doesn’t have an identity problem? Oh, well, I guess that’s for me and my shrink to work out.) Anyway, aside from the fact of whether it was my twin brother or me who drowned, what I wanted to ask was this: Are you sure the immersion was fatal? No, it’s not my macabre sense of humor talking. Honest, Ma, I’m being serious. You see, lately, I’ve had reason to doubt that it was.

What reason? Good question, Mums. But the answer isn’t simple and they haven't built a nutshell big enough to hold it. It involves a latter-day would-be Alexander the Great, crimes of violence, crimes of passion, international intrigue, derring-do, and a whole gaggle of glamor girls who are, as you used to put it, “no better than they should be” — which I maintain is no worse than you’d have them be. I can hear you now, sighing and saying what could I expect, the line of work I’m in, if only I’d of been a doctor like you wanted. But that’s all chicken soup under the bridge, Ma. The thing is that O.R.G.Y. is my career and it’s not my fault if that makes me valuable to my country in espionage work. Besides, I’d have made a lousy doctor; the sight of blood upsets the hell out of me. Yeah, I guess that’s not so good for a spy, either. But who isn’t a little square-peg-in-a-round-hole-ish?

Now how did I get off on all that? What’s really important is this business of my twin brother maybe not having really drowned and running around with my kisser and knocking people off. It’s pretty disturbing, I can tell you. So will you please write and tell me if you’re absolutely sure he went all the way down the drain. Maybe then I’ll be able to concentrate on S.M.U.T.

What’s S.M.U.T.? Read the book, Ma. And while you’re doing that, think of your ever-loving son,

Steve

chapter one

"HA-ha-ha-ha-ho-ho-ho-ho-hee-hee-hee-hee-ha-ha-ha! ”

“Wh did you kill our man in Manila, Mr. Victor?”

“Ha-liyo-hee-ha-ho!” I replied. I’d never been in Manila in my life. And I hadn’t killed anybody-—recently.

“Who betrayed us to you?” The voluptuous and naked bust inflated impatiently with the question.

“Hee-hee-ho-ho-ha!” I didn’t know the answer anyway, so it didn’t matter that I was laughing too hard to speak .

“Who is the traitor in our organization? ” The exotic, upside-down face of the Maltese beauty twisted savagely.

“Ho-ho-hee-hee-ha-ha-ho!” I was running out of breath from the agony of my laughter.

“Who is your contact in S.M.U.T.? ”

"Uh-ha-uh-ha-uh-ha-uh-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!” I went off on another uncontrollable spasm of giggling.

She stepped away then to give me time to get over it. Now I had an upside-down view of her full figure. There was a black half-slip covering the bottom portion to the knees. The sunlight shining from the window behind her made it transparent, though, and her lissome legs were completely visible. The slip hugged sleek, tall-girl hips and then angled in to a quite narrow waist. Above the waist, as I mentioned, she was naked. Large breasts swayed like ripe melons—melons still on the vine, but ready for plucking-and her green eyes glittered with a perverse sort of enjoyment as she waited for me to stop laughing. She smoothed back her long black hair. It had fallen over her olive-skinned features-—a sultry, Latin sort of face—in the course of her provoking my laughters. She set it right with her left hand.

In her right hand she still held the long goose feather. I forced myself to keep laughing so she’d hold off using it again. It wasn’t easy, because my ribs ached awfully. Partly they ached from the laughing, and partly from the muscle-straining position I was forced to assume.

It really was one helluva position. I was standing, but bent over so that my hands were touching my ankles. Each hand was tied to the corresponding ankle. And my legs had been spread wide apart so that the calves could be laced to a pair of bedposts in such a way that I could neither squat nor straighten up.

This particular position served another purpose. It left the most intimate part of my anatomy clearly exposed from the rear. It was this dangling sac which my tormentor had been so delicately stroking with the goose feather. A byproduct of the pose was that I could see her clearly—although upside-down—through my parted legs. And her ace told me she was enjoying this exquisite torture to the point where it was becoming more important to her than getting answers to the questions she was posing. It didn’t matter, though, because my mind was truly as bare of answers as my body was of clothing.

When I had taken my clothes off just a short time before, I’d certainly never anticipated this. This Maltese cat had looked as if she might scratch if I strayed into just the proper erogenous zone, but I sure hadn’t figured her to truss me up like a turkey and start tickling me to death. How could I have known what she had in mind when she plucked that tail-feather from a live—and then suddenly lively--goose?

The plucking took place only a few minutes before she’d enticed me into this room. I’d only known her an hour or so then. She’d lured me in a very unusual way. She’d squirted milk at me from the udder of a Maltese goat.

It never occurred to me that she might have done it deliberately. Indeed, at that moment, as I wiped the fresh goat milk from my eye, I took it for granted that it was my fault. My intense and calculated curiosity had made me stick my nose into the udder area-where it certainly didn’t belong—and the resulting eyewash seemed just (if unpasteurized) deserts.

My over-eagerness stemmed from the fact that this was the first lactating Maltese goat I’d found since arriving in Malta the evening before. You see, the opportunity to observe just such a milking was a large part of the reason I’d come to the Mediterranean island. It was a strange quest, even for the man from O.R.G.Y.

The man from O.R.G.Y.? That's me, Steve Victor. Indeed, to bypass discretion and be absolutely honest about it, I am O.R.G.Y. The initials stand for “Organization for the Rational Guidance of Youth”—-which is something of a deliberate misnomer. O.R.G.Y. is really a one-man outfit dedicated to compiling data about sex. Its financing comes in the form of grants and specific assignments from various foundations having a sociological interest in such facts. I sometimes exaggerate the scope of O.R.G.Y. for the purpose of getting this financing, but other than that my operation is on the up-and-up. I do my own investigating, and the info I pass along is quite authentic. O.R. G.Y. has an untarnished reputation, and many of the most reputable research organizations in the world make use of my services.

None of them, however, was responsible for my being in Malta, nor for my too-close interest in milk-shpritzing Maltese goats. It was the U.S. government—unoffficially, and prepared to disown me at the drop of a Stetson, of course—which prompted my Maltese sojourn Ostensibly, I was just another tourist responding to the new Maltese government’s efforts to build up the economy by attracting vacationers. Anybody digging deeper might uncover my connection with O.R.G.Y., but that was all right. Let them think my ulterior motive in coming to Malta had to do with sex investigations. That was just another layer of camouflage to conceal my real purpose.

There was supposed to be only one other person in Malta besides myself who knew what that real purpose was. Arrangements had been made for us to meet that first night after I checked into my hotel. We would know each other on sight, for we had met before.

His name was Lagula. He was an Oxford-educated African Pigmy in the service of British Intelligence. The last time I’d seen him had been in Rhodesia. On that occasion he’d been hightailing it for the bush and thumbing his nose at the white supremacist cops falling behind in their pursuit of him. The last thing he’d asked me to do was to submit his regretful resignation to British Intelligence. The rebel Rhodesians were onto him, and he felt he’d outlived his usefulness. So Lagula had planned to return to his tribe which, having been decimated by an earthquake, consisted only of five eager Pigmy girls whose demands on his virility would be excessive to say the least. On my way to meet him, I wondered how he’d measured up to those demands and if they’d had anything to do with his rejoining British Intelligence.

We were to contact each other in the gambling casino. This is an all-new and quite lavish setup which has just been opened by the Maltese government as part of its effort to compete with the Italian Riviera for the tourist trade. It operates on a government subsidy, as do the two new hotels recently erected in Valletta, the capital city of Malta. I was staying at one of those hotels. En route from it to the casino, I passed the site selected for the building of a third hotel. This will be the Hilton-Wyncorr, a 400-bed luxury establishment which it is estimated it will take two years to build. The newly independent Maltese government is providing fifty percent of the financing for it.

This Maltese independence only dates from September 21, 1964. Prior to that it was a British possession. Today it still exists as a member of the British Commonwealth of Nations. This enables the British to maintain a strong military garrison on the Maltese Islands, in exchange for which privilege they are providing the Maltese with some fifty million pounds of economic assistance. By the terms of this agreement, British troops are supposed to remain for ten years, but the Malta Labour Party, which stands in opposition to the present government, is likewise strongly opposed to the agreement with the British. Since this-party lost out in the recent constitutional election by only a hair—they lost 66,000 to 5 6,000, but an additional 9,000 votes were declared “invalid”— the British foothold in Malta is extremely precarious.

Nevertheless, there were many British officers in the casino when I arrived. On the whole, these officers were career types. They sported dress uniforms, escorted angular, expensively bedecked British ladies, and generally seemed to be looking down their noses at both the native Maltese and the tourists. They were anachronisms, the living forebears of the “ugly American” despite their being British, and exuded an air of self-satisfied superiority.

Their snobbery asserted itself with the appearance of Lagula at the roulette table. I’d been standing there for a while before he arrived, staking some of the U.S. taxpayers’ money on the black. As usual, the taxpayer landed in the red. I stayed on black anyway, aware that the shadowy agent which supplied funds for my expenses was never called to account or such disbursements.

Lagula stood at my elbow for a moment and watched, smiling at my stubbornness. The top of his head just about reached that elbow, and his eyes were just about on a level with the spinning wheel. Yet, in his miniature fashion, he cut a fine figure. Black tux, white shirt with a subdued ruffle, maroon bow tie -- Lagula was right in style, and not at all overdressed. His high brow, which lent his sharp-featured face s look of intellect to which he more than lived up, wrinkled with cynical humor as some of the British officers responded to his presence by ostentatiously moving their ladies away.

It burned me. So much so that while I made my greeting casual, I also made sure it was loud enough to be overheard. “Good to see you again, Prince,” I said. “How did things go in London? Did you and Harold come to an agreement? ”

“In essence, but the details remain to be finalized.” Lagula was quick on the uptake. “Our discussions were frank, and Sir Harold did agree on the need to weed out certain of the more insufferable members of the officer caste before appointing a governor general and a military advisor. He appreciated the fact that the Sandhurst tradition might drive us smack into the arms of the Russians. One snub, after all, can undo months of the most delicate and high-level diplomatic discussions.”

“Then there will be a shake-up in the Colonial services?”

“Absolutely. And,” Lagula added in a loud whisper, “the first troops will be supplied from the Malta garrison. Those officers with a history of color discrimination will be the first to be reassigned. Sir Harold has a sense of humor, you know. He intends to act on my recommendations by attaching the undesirables to the Gurkha volunteer regiments as sub-officers under a Nepalese commander.”

“I don’t believe we’ve met.” One of the officers was prodding his reluctant lady back alongside us. “I’m Major Dwight Worthby.” Watery blue eyes tried hard to look friendly as they peered out of a lobster-red sunburn over a toothbrush moustache. “And this is my-”

“I’m sorry, but I’m afraid you’ve committed a serious breach of protocol,” I interrupted. “The Prince does not speak to foreigners unless they have a letter of introduction. Do you have such a letter? ”

“Ha-rumph! Well, no, but—”

“Then there is nothing more to be said.” I turned my back on him and watched the last of my chips fall prey to the red.

Lagula and I moved off together. “Major Dwight Worthby,” he mused aloud. “I will make a note of that name.”

“Of course, Your Highness. You could hardly be expected to accept an officer who doesn’t appreciate his place.”

In our wake, Major Worthby’s face turned from red to scarlet. Lagula and I grinned at each other and went into the ornate cocktail lounge. We found a table at the back where we could talk without being overheard.

It is good to see you again,” I told him when the waiter had moved away after serving our drinks.

“And I am happy to see you, Mr. Victor.”

“Save the ‘Mister’ for the colonial put-on, will you?”

“Okay, Steve.”

“How come you’re back with the English I-spies?” I asked him.

“I needed a vacation from my five brides.”

“Kind of a dangerous vacation.”

“Everything is relative, Steve. I prefer the chanciness of espionage to the sure death of trying to keep five avid females sexually satisfied over a long period of time. I thought that when I’d made all five pregnant things might slow down. But I was wrong. Their swollen bellies only made them more carnal. And so I fled back to the asexual safety of British Intelligence.”

“Considering that bunch of Colonel Blimps inside, I wonder why you should choose to work for the British at all.”

“They’re not typical of the average Britisher, only of a particular class which is on its way out. They’re dying right off with the death of colonialism. In general, for all their faults, I find the English the most humane and unprejudiced of peoples. Of all the civilizations in the world, theirs is the one, despite its shortcomings, which comes closest to being worthy of admiration and emulation. Besides, I work for them because in their own hedging way, they are trying to free Rhodesia from the grip of its apartheid government.”

“But it isn’t the Rhodesian situation which brings you here.”

“Correct. I’m here for the same reason you are: to trace the connection between S.M.U.T. and Malta Fever.”

“How long have you been on it?” I asked.

“About a week. I’ve been following up the clinic cases, trying to find a common denominator.”

“Any success?”

“I’m not sure.” Lagula drummed his fingers against the rim of his cocktail glass. “But indications seem to point to some of the male patients having contracted it at a particular brothel. I notified London of this two days ago.”

“Which is why they asked my government to send me here,” I told him. “I’m supposed to be an expert on brothels and such.”

“Well, you’ll have to wait until tomorrow night to investigate this one. There’s a private party going on there tonight and it’s closed to the public. Have you any plans for tomorrow during the day?”

“I thought I’d rent a car and take a drive around the countryside. I want to have a look at some Maltese goats. See how they’re milked. That sort of thing.”

“A good idea.” Lagula nodded. “You should try to learn something in that area. It may come in handy later when we’ve got enough pieces to try to put the puzzle together. I’m going to spend tomorrow following up on some more of the clinic cases,” he added. “Hopefully, by evening I’ll have further confirmation of the involvement of the brothel. I’ll pick you up at your hotel about nine. Will that be all right?”

I told him it would, and we parted company then. I drifted back into the casino, went through another stack of chips, decided roulette wasn’t my game, and headed back to my hotel. It was still short of midnight when I hit the sack.

The next morning I got an early start. I splurged and rented a new Porsche, the six-cylinder job with the six carbs, bright red and purring to be let out. But I kept the r’s down as I wended through the streets of Valletta to the outskirts of the city.

Valletta is one of the most picturesque and historically interesting cities in the world. It sits on the side of Mount Sceberras and overlooks the Grand Harbour to the southeast, a U-shaped inlet of deep blue water lying between Ricasoli Point and Fort St. Elmo. The city is named after its founder, the Grand Master de la Valette.

But the history of Valletta, like that of all of Malta, long pre-dates De la Valette and his fabled Knights of Malta. Both city and island chain continue to be a treasure trove of clues for archaeologists seeking the relics of pre-history. Originally, they have concluded, Malta was part of a land-bridge uniting Italy and Africa. The teeth of Neanderthal men have been found in its caves. Bronze Age pottery is continually being unearthed. Other relics from different eras of the dawn of civilization have enabled them to deduce the evolution of humanity on Malta on up to One Thousand B.C., when the first Phoenicians settled there.

In Six B.C., the Carthaginians settled peacefully on Malta with the Phoenicians. Despite the fact that the Maltese fought off Greeks, Romans and Byzantines during the next two thousand years, compared to other cultures theirs was relatively peaceful. In 1090 the Normans conquered Malta, but even this was only a ripple in the generally serene history of the islands. It wasn’t until 1530 when Charles V of Aragon “gave” Malta to the Knights of St. John, thereby establishing Spanish rule, that Malta began its reputation as one of the most violent spots in the world. But even then there was a lapse of twenty years because the Maltese easily accepted the rather light rule of the Order of St. John.

Then, in May, 1565, Soliman II marshalled his army of Mohammedans to march on Christian Europe. His first objective was Malta, and it was to prove his downfall. The Turks launched their attack against St. Elmo in an effort to gain control of the harbor so that they’d have a base for their fleet. An army of 38,500 Turks attacked St. Elmo. It was defended by 1,200 Knights of Malta, all Spaniards or native Maltese with the exception of one Englishman, Oliver Starkey. The incredible happened. The Knights of St. Elmo held out against the cruelest siege in recorded history. Over 7,000 Turks were killed and double that number wounded before St. Elmo finally fell. Every man jack of the 1,200 died in the defense of St. Elmo. But their deaths served a purpose which affected the entire Western world.

After the fall of St. Elmo, Soliman II marshaled his forces to gain control of the mountain overlooking the harbor. He was met by a force of 6,000 under the command of the Grand Master de la Valette. The Turks were weakened by the ordeal of St. Elmo. The defenders were solidly entrenched on the mountain, and in a superior strategical position. The battle raged for weeks. It ended on September 8, when Mustapha, Soliman II’s commander in the field, gathered what was left of his forces aboard his ships and fled the harbor. Malta was saved, and, more important, the Mohammedan invasion of Europe had been stopped before it really got underway.

From then on the Maltese were to rarely know peace. De la Valette built the city which bears his name with an eye toward defending it against invaders. Even today it still stands as the foremost example of fortification in the world. And perhaps that is why from its inception it has challenged one invader after another.

In 1675 it was the British, in 1722 a rebellion by Turkish slaves, in 1798 the French under Napoleon—one of the few who succeeded, not by attack, but by collaboration from the corrupt Maltese government of the day who virtually made him a present of Malta --, in 1799 a revolution against the French which cooperated with a takeover by the English under Admiral Lord Nelson, in the early 1800s a running war between the English and French for control of Malta, and finally, in 1814, a British conquest which was to stand for over a century. This brought relative peace until World War One when Malta was established as Britain’s foremost naval base in the Mediterranean. But it was World War Two which brought the Maltese mettle once again to the attention of an admiring world.

For three years, from 1940 through 1943, Malta withstood a new kind of siege --- an air attack of a frequency and ferocity unmatched in modern warfare. A thousand miles distant from Britain, Malta was stragegically the most important stronghold in the war. It lay right smack between Italy and North Africa, which was then held by German and Italian forces. It was the only spot in the Mediterranean where British warships might refuel. It was the only place the British Navy could launch raids from; it was the only harbor available to merchant ships en route to the Suez Canal to supply Allied forces in North Africa. And it was the only place from which the Royal Air Force could launch bombing raids against Italy and North Africa.

But it was also only twenty minutes flying time from German and Italian bomber bases in Sicily. Twenty minutes . . . At the peak of the raids, that was precisely the amount of time allowed to elapse between bombings. Day and night they came over every twenty minutes and dropped their bombs.

The heroism of the civilian population was matched only by the valor of the handful of RAF fighter pilots who, along with insufficient ack-ack, comprised the only defense the island had against the siege. Gasoline for their aircraft and food and medical supplies for the civilians had to be shipped to Malta by submarine. The Axis blockade barred any other means of supplying the island.

Capitulation was expected daily, but it didn’t come. In April, 1942, George VI of England paid tribute to Malta’s heroism by awarding the George Cross “to the island fortress of Malta to ear witness to a heroism and devotion that will long be famous in history.” This is the only time in history that such an honor has been conferred upon an entire people. But with the awarding of the medal, the ordeal was far from over. It went on for fourteen months more, and still Malta survived the constant pounding.

Now, driving from Valletta through the suburbs of Floriana and into the mountainous countryside, I could still see evidences of the pounding the city had taken more than twenty years ago. The British government had made an outright gift of ten million pounds to rebuild Malta, but there were still ruins visible of some of the more than seven thousand buildings destroyed. Among those still standing which were irreparably damaged, but not completely destroyed, are such historical structures as the Cathedral of St. John and the opera house. The destruction of some of the archaeological excavations is a loss which can never be redeemed. As I left the city behind me, I reflected that all the new construction was changing its character; the works of the Maltese artisans were now unique where once they had been the rule, and mass production housing was turning the skyline behind me from fabled Phoenician to a vulgar Mediterranean Parkchester.

It was sad, but the sadness left me as I drove through acre after acre of fields cultivated to produce “sulla.” This is a tall clover with beautiful purple blossoms, and it looks far more romantic than the fodder it is. Passing the cultivated fields, I came to the grazing lands, and here the goats I was seeking abounded everywhere.

Spotting what looked like a well-kept farmhouse, I pulled my car off the main road and into a wide driveway. The driveway led to an area behind the house which was large enough to be used as a parking lot. I got out of the car and walked toward a sort of patio in the rear.

A middle-aged woman was standing there, sorting fresh-washed clothing from a large wicker basket. The garments were all black, and all seemed to be feminine. There was a clothesline running from a corner of the house to a tree. Three young girls were busy hanging clothes on it. Like the older woman, they wore the black dress which is the uniform garb of Maltese females in city and countryside alike. The dress itself is a shapeless frock with a high neckline and reaches halfway down the shinbone. Heavy black stockings and sturdy black shoes are worn with it. From the shoulder a large semicircular cowl extends upward above the head, giving the wearer the look of a medieval monk from a distance. The garment is made of heavy wool, but the women of Malta wear it the year round. On this particular day the temperature was around sixty degrees—warm for January, but not really unusual—and the dress seemed sensible enough. But I knew they’d be wearing the same garb in summer when the thermometer hit the nineties, and that they’d probably appear just as coolly comfortable then as they did now.

The older woman greeted me in Phoenician Maltese, the native tongue of Malta which is akin to Syrian and Arabic. I recognized the language, but I don’t speak it, and so I replied in English. The Maltese are a bi-lingual people, and speak English fluently. Now the lady switched over without effort.

“It is too early for guests,” she said. But she said it with a smile, and her tone was more hospitable than the words would imply.

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to disturb you. It’s just that I’m interested in your goats.”

“Our goats? But of course.” Her very lack of inflection seemed all-permissive, as if to say “Well, why not? everybody gets his kicks different ways.”

“I’d like to observe one being milked,” I told her.

“All right.” She shrugged. “Out there behind the barn.” She pointed. “Domino is milking the goats. You may watch if you like.”

I thanked her and started off toward the barn. The three girls at the clothesline shot me glances from over their shoulders as I passed, but they quickly turned away when I smiled at them. Maltese girls are usually quite sheltered and man-shy, and so I kept going, not wanting to step on any local mores. Later I’d learn just how misguided my delicacy was.

My assumption was that Domino would be a man. With the women at the washing, it seemed likely that the men of the household would be performing the barnyard tasks. But I was wrong. Domino turned out to be another black-cowled female, a strikingly beautiful girl with the lustrous black hair and olive skin indigenous to the Mediterranean, but much taller than the average Maltese girls, who are generally quite petite.

“Are you Domino?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“The lady of the house said you wouldn’t mind if I watched you milking the goats.”

“All right.” She shot me a curious look. It wasn’t shy, but it wasn’t bold either. Rather it was frankly inquisitive and a bit suspicious. Domino smacked the rump of the goat she’d just finished milking, and it bounded off toward the patch of “sulla” where its fellows were grazing. She placed the bucket of milk alongside the barn where half a dozen other brimful buckets were already standing. Then she picked up an empty bucket. “Come along.” She motioned to me to follow as she crossed over to a stall. She led a goat out of the stall and back over to where she’d left the milking stool. Halfway there a goose crossed her path, squawking loudly and flapping its wings. Domino’s hand swooped down, and she wrenched a long tail feather from the goose. It squealed even more loudly and shook itself wildly as if in energetic protest. Then it scurried off with a flat-footed burst of speed, as if to tell the world at large of the indignity it had suffered. Domino smiled—a bit sadistically, I thought-and tickled the goat’s whiskers with the long quill she’d plucked. The goat reared back, irritated. “Making her a bit skittish churns up the milk so it will flow freely,” Domino explained to me as she brought the goat under control.

“I see.” I bent low to watch as she manipulated the faucets of the goat’s udder.

Too low. And too close. The goat bleated, and the stream of milk shot straight from the teat and into my eye. It was surprising how much it burned. No matter how I poked with my handkerchief and squeezed the eye shut, it continued to smart.

“I’m so sorry.” Domino apologized smoothly.

“My own damn fault,” I said, embarrassed at the way my eye kept tearing.

“I’m afraid it’s all over your jacket, too,” she said. “We’d better wash it out immediately, before it leaves a permanent stain.”

Domino put the goat back in the stall and then led me back to the farmhouse. We went in the back way; the only sign of the women who’d been in the yard was the wash neatly strung out along the line. Domino guided me through the back door and into a small downstairs bedroom adjacent to it. “Wait here while I get some hot water,” she instructed.

I waited. A few moments later she returned with a basin. I took off my suit jacket and she scrubbed at it until the milkstain vanished. Then she crossed over to the window and hung it over the sill to dry in the sun.

When she turned back to me, Domino seemed somehow transformed. She no longer had the serious mien of a farm girl with mundane tasks to perform. Rather her expression was kittenish, a sort of “school’s out” attitude that anticipated an afternoon of fun. And the way she chucked me under the chin with the goose feather said she was eager for the fun to begin.

Of necessity, I was sprawled on the bed. There was only one chair in the room, a severe, straight-backed piece of furniture, and it was already occupied—by a bidet. So Domino had to kneel beside me to inaugurate the feathery chin-chucking.

Being ticklish, I automatically grabbed her wrist to make her stop. I hadn’t grabbed very hard, and I hadn’t meant to pull her toward me, but she sprawled over me as if I’d deliberately yanked her off balance. Her face was very close to mine, the lips parted, the eyes half-closed. The quick way she was breathing confirmed the invitation.

I kissed her. It was a long, deep kiss, and it ended only when she started teasing me with that damn goose feather again. I tried to wrench it from her grasp, but she pulled away, giggling. Another grab on my part, and then we were wrestling on the bed.

Domino held the quill to her breasts, and so that’s where I grabbed. She laughed again, excitedly, as my hands moved over her breasts. She wasn’t wearing any bra under the harsh wool of her dress, and I could feel the warmth of her flesh. I let my hands linger there and was rewarded by the hard-straining feel of her breast tips growing rigid.

Now she tickled the back of my neck with the feather again. I held her hand at a safer distance, and with my other hand I pushed the long black skirt up over the heavy stockings until I could see the quivering flesh above their tops. She grew quiet as my hand moved higher. Her thighs parted obligingly as I brushed the half-slip out of the way and found she wasn’t wearing any panties either. Her femininity pulsed against my hand for a moment, and then she pulled gently away. “Just a minute,” she told me, her voice deep and throaty.

Domino stood up. She kicked off her shoes and bent to remove her stockings. Then she unbuttoned the dress and pulled it off over her head. She, stood there a moment wearing only her half-slip, and I studied her with admiration. Her slim-hipped figure with its long legs, narrow waist, and imposing breasts was alive with sensuality. The long, maroon nipples seemed to beckon to me.

I responded. I got up off the bed and quickly shucked off my clothes. Last of all, when I was naked, I bent to remove my socks and shoes. A gentleman never makes love with his shoes on. I believe Errol Flynn made that observation. He paid for it with a front-page scandal. Now I too was about to learn something about the high price of being a gentleman.

As I stood there, doubled over, fumbling with my shoelace, the door to the room suddenly opened and I was hit from the rear. It happened before I realized that Domino and I suddenly had company. “What the—-?!” I exclaimed. But it was too late. They were on me by then.

It was the three girls I’d seen out at the clothesline before. The middle-aged woman was behind them, as if directing the operation. When I struggled, Domino came to their aid, and I was no match for the four of them. Without a word, they tied my hands to my ankles and my calves to the bedpost, and left. The door closed behind them, and once again I was alone with Domino.

“How did you know to come here, Mr. Victor?” That’s how she began. I wondered for a brief instant how she knew my name. I stopped wondering as the indescribable sensation swept over me when Domino delicately dipped the tip of the feather between my thighs from behind so that the spheres of my manhood swayed ever so slightly.

"Ha-ha-ha-ho-ho-ho-hee-hee-hee-ha-ho-ha-hee!” Thus it started.

It kept up for a while before the pause. But now the pause was over and Domino was about to resume the feathery torture again. I gritted my teeth against the upside-down view of her approaching with the feather extended toward my haunches.

“Why did you kill our man in Manila?”

Manila again! What did it mean? “I didn’t kill anybody in Manila!” I tried to tell her.

She ignored my protest. The feather wiggled again.

“Ha-ha-ho—ho-hee-hee! ”

I'd never thought back in London two days before that Malta would turn out to be such a lot of laughs.

"Hee-hee-hee-hee-ho-ho-ho-ho—ho-ha-ha—ha-ha-hee-ha- ho-ha-hee! ”

Yep! I was really tickled pink!

chapter two

LONDON. Sex was simpler there. No feather-wielding sado-sirens. No getting all tied up in knots. No erotic quiz shows. Relations, so to speak, were a lot less ticklish.

Still, they weren’t altogether uncomplicated. Nothing is where Charles Putnam is involved. He has a positive knack for taking the edge off my sex life. For instance, consider the way in which he’d arranged to have the particular message summoning me brought to my attention. The so-and-so had inserted it where he knew I’d be sure to find it. He’d placed it between the plump and highly erotic nether cheeks of a semi-pro British joy-girl named Gladys¹ .

It was a late date. When I phoned Gladys, she’d said the early part of her evening would be taken up with “han holder gentleman, ha real toff.” She’d agreed to leave the door off the latch so I could let myself in after he’d gone. It was after midnight when I got there, and Gladys was sound asleep on the bed, naked, the note from Putnam waving from her derriere.

My ego was hurt, having to take Putnam’s seconds, even if they were far from sloppy. And my performance was off, my mind distracted equally by Gladys’s sighs over “the henergy hof the hold gent” and the ominous reference to S.M.U.T. in the note. So I didn’t linger. I gave Gladys a sort of schoolboy promise to improve, and left to see Putnam.

He was as imperturbable as ever. “A remarkable young lady,” he commented with his usual staid attitude when I asked him how he liked Gladys. “There are times when I envy you your work, Mr. Victor.”

“And there are times when you poach on my preserves,” I pointed out.

“Your preserves?” His gray, monkeylike eyebrows shot up to his jagged hairline. “Surely the particular pot under discussion is in the public domain.”

He had me there. Gladys was anything but exclusive. The numbers of men who’d climbed aboard her erotic trolley were legion; indeed, she was sort of a one-girl British rapid transit facility. Still, it galled me that Putnam of all people should have preceded me aboard. Gladys may have long since gone public, but she might have been a little more discriminating in her transactions. But how could I blame her? How could she have known that Putnam would use her lush bottom as a mail-drop?

“Something tells me you’re going to get me into a lot worse jam,” I told Putnam now.

“You’ve become cynical, Mr. Victor.”

“I may not be bright, but I learn something from experience,” I told him. “And every time you con me into an operation, it comes up smelling danger.”

It was true. I’d dodged bullets, knives, bombs, and what-have-you at Putnam’s behest in the past. Every time he waved the stars-and-bars under my nose, it meant he expected me to lay my life on the line. I suppose it was part of his job to get me to risk my neck.

His job? Officially, it doesn’t exist. Which isn’t surprising, because officially Charles Putnam doesn’t exist. But then why should he? The first time I’d met him he told me that Charles Putnam wasn’t his real name. Since then I’d come to the conclusion that he didn’t have a real name. In my more paranoid moments, I thought of him as either a government machine with a serial number, or some sort of nameless monster which periodically crawled out from under a rock in my subconscious. Yes, a monster prodding my conscience to patriotism—that was Charles Putnam.

Still, he was real enough, and much as I would have liked to, I couldn’t deny him his reality. No, there was no denying the bulky figure in the impeccably styled smoking jacket with the mashed-up goon-face topped by steel-gray hair above it. As usual, the incongruity of Charles Putnam struck me as I sat across from him. He looked like a second-rate plug-ugly with too many beatings under his belt, but his grooming, his dress, his manners, his bearing were all smoothly aristocratic. It was as if he was some sort of visibly split personality which, I suppose, was right in keeping with his function.

This function placed Putnam somewhere in that hazy world between diplomacy and espionage. Here he stood balanced between the CIA and the U.S. State Department, beholden to neither, exerting some authority on both, acknowledged by neither, depended on by both. His position was that of a top-secret cipher never visibly weighed in government policy, but frequently the determining factor in the formation of such policy. He was financed generously, and always under “Miscellaneous.” He’s the man who wasn’t there, and I’m frequently his reluctant pawn.

I was resigned to it by now, and I’d given up making even a token protest. I knew I’d do whatever he wanted because it was for the good of the U.S., and with all the misgivings I sometimes feel about my country’s actions in places like Vietnam and the Dominican Republic, I still love the U.S. and stand ready to serve it. So I sat back now and listened while he put me in the picture.

It was S.M.U.T. all over again, as he'd indicated in his note. S.M.U.T.—Society for Moral Uplift Today—is an organization with the avowed purpose of being agin’ sin. More than that, they’re opposed to sex in any way, shape, manner, or form. All over the world they fight everything sexual from cheesecake pictures to unexpurgated Shakespeare, from birth control devices to bordellos, from adultery and free love to low necklines and high hemlines. Theirs is a high moral crusade attracting the righteous. But what the righteous don’t know, what only a select few high-ups in various governments do know, is that S.M.U.T. is a fraud, a front for an organization with a far more sinister purpose.

That purpose is no less than the conquest of the entire world. And the means by which they intend to accomplish it is overpopulation. By removing all forms of sexual sublimation from the environment, S.M.U.T.’s ambition is to breed a race of human slaves dependent on them for a survival which they are even now seeing to it that only S.M.U.T. can provide. With a population explosion of their own devising, S.M.U.T. plans to transform people into sheep.

I’d thrown a monkey-wrench into these plans the last time Putnam had recruited my help against S.M.U.T. But I hadn’t put them out of business. I hadn’t been able to find out who the top man was. And from what Putnam was telling me now, I hadn’t really put more than an annoying dent in their operation; my interference had simply made them take off in a different direction, that was all.

I listened to Putnam telling me what he knew about this direction. “It started quite a few years back with the British,” he told me. “After the war, gratitude made them take a more than usual interest in the islands of Malta, then one of their possessions. They found that the greatest problem in Malta aside from war damage was its phenomenal population growth. Before the war the population numbered about 268,000. Since then it’s been growing at the rate of 3,000 a year. Today there’s a population density on the islands of 2,277 per square mile. Considering that it’s an agricultural country, and that Britain, which is an industrial country, has an average population density of 468 per square mile, you get some idea of why the British became worried over the scope of the problem. However, they never thought of its being related to the activities of S.M.U.T. until recently.”

“Why recently?” I asked. “What happened?”

“Two things. First of all an outbreak of Malta Fever in corners of the world where it’s never been known to exist before.”

“What’s Malta Fever?”

“Malta Fever,” Putnam made noises like an encyclopedia, “is a disease characterized by anaemia, swelling of the joints, and neuritis. It’s extremely painful, and can last anywhere from four months to two or three years. Up until recently, it was only found on Malta and Gibraltar. And its cause was directly traceable to the Micrococcus Melitensis, a microorganism only found present in the milk of Maltese goats.”

“But what has this got to do with S.M.U.T.?”

“Just this. This same goats’ milk may have certain aphrodisiac characteristics. It isn’t proven yet, but research is under way which tends to point to a relationship between Maltese population growth and the fertility fostered by a diet of milk from Maltese goats. Now, in places where Malta Fever has inexplicably broken out, there has also been an upsurge in the birth rate. This combination of facts points to the Maltese goats. But the Maltese export neither their goats nor the milk they provide. Still, the places where these two factors have been noted are also places where S.M.U.T. is firmly entrenched.”

“Interesting. What’s the second factor you mentioned?”

“A shipment of black-market contraceptives.”

“Huh?”

“Exactly our reaction, Mr. Victor. Ours and the British. Why should it be necessary today to peddle contraceptives on the black market? That’s what we asked ourselves. We didn’t find the answer, but we came up with a raft of interrelated—and even more puzzling-data.”

“Such as?”

“The shipment was in the process of being smuggled ashore on a Maltese beach when one of our coastal patrols interfered. None of the people involved were apprehended. It was impossible to determine the point of origin of the shipment. The crates were broken open and the contraceptive contents -- all male contraceptives, by the way—revealed. And upon examination it was found that every single contraceptive was pierced with a miniature pinhole, an invisible pinhole, which rendered it useless.”

“But what does it mean?”

“We’re not sure. But it certainly looks like someone was doing his best to see to it that the Maltese birth rate keeps soaring. Our guess is that that someone is S.M.U.T.”

“And where do I figure in all this?” I wanted to know.

“We require your services as the man from O.R.G.Y. once again, Mr. Victor. We have just had a report from a British agent that seems to point to a connection between certain cases of Malta Fever and a specific brothel on the island of Malta. We wish you to go to Malta and contact this agent. I believe you know him. His name is Lagula. He is an African Pigmy.”

“Yes. I know him.”

“Good. We want you to investigage this brothel. We want you to try to trace any connection between it and the goats’ milk which causes Malta Fever. Specifically, we want you to try to trace the involvement of S.M.U.T. in all this. Hopefully, we want to try to trace S.M.U.T. to its source. We want to nail down the man in charge and stop his activities once and for all. Toward this end, you are free to follow whatever trail you may unearth.”

“Thanks a whole bunch,” I told Putnam. I thought about it a moment. “Is there any connection between the contraband contraceptives and this brothel you mentioned?” I asked finally.

“None that we can pin down. We suspect it’s all part of some larger master plan having to do with S.M.U.T., but we can only guess at the connection.”

“Then you don’t know who was slated to get the shipment?”

“No.”

“And there may actually be no connection.”

“That’s true. Still, if S.M.U.T. is behind it—”

“That’s pretty iffy.”

“We live in an iffy world, Mr. Victor. It may well be that you are off on a wild-goose chase.”

Just how wild a goose, Charles Putnam couldn’t have known. True, it was only one feather from the goose’s tail, but it was still as wild a chaser for an aborted sex act as ever came my way. And it kept coming now, pulling my mind back from the interview with Putnam in London to the sadistically hilarious present probing ticklishly between my thighs. Nor did the bare-busted Domino show any signs of letting up on her feather-dusting.

I was laughing my head off, but she only smiled coldly and kept right on with her excruciating ministrations.

“Who betrayed our Manila agent?” Domino wanted to know. “Why did you go to Manila? What led you from there to Malta?” she persisted. “How much have you learned about S.M.U.T.? Who is the informer?”

My laughter was no more than a feeble wheeze now. I hadn’t the strength left to produce any more sound than that. And it felt as if quite soon I wouldn’t even have the breath left for that. I was facing the fact that it might really be possible for me to be tickled to death.

“Talk, Mr. Victor! Tell me every—-”

Domino was interrupted by the door to the room opening and closing. The middle-aged woman strode up to her and stayed her hand. The torture of the tickling stopped, and I felt only a strong steady itch in the blessed hiatus. I managed to focus an upside-down view of the two of them talking, and since they made no attempt to keep me from hearing, I was privy to their conversation.

“I’ve just been in contact with Manila,” the older woman said. “There’s been a mistake. We’ve been taken in.”

“What do you mean, Madam Renado?” Domino asked.

“This man is not Steve Victor. He is an impostor,”

Madam Renado told her. “He has probably been sent to Malta for the express purpose of duping us. Steve Victor is still in Manila.”

“But Why—? ”

“We don’t know why. It’s up to you to find out, Domino. And if your technique doesn’t work, then we’ll have to take stronger measures.”

“I don’t see how he can hold out much longer,” Domino assured her.

I echoed that to myself. Even if my body held up under further feather-torture, I couldn’t be sure that my mind would. The prolonged laughter already had me feeling on the verge of hysteria.

“Then you may resume,” Madam Renado told Domino, and once again she left us alone.

She flicked the feather just once more before I hollered uncle. “No more!” I pleaded. “I can’t stand any more. I’ll tell you anything you want to know. Only don’t do it again. Don’t tickle me again.”

“Very well.” Domino knelt to untie me.

I straightened, and it was good to see everything right side up again. Not so good was the main view which consisted of a very large revolver clutched in Domino’s hand and pointed squarely at the left ventricle of my heart. It took my mind off her magnificiently naked and heaving bosom.

“Sit down,” she ordered, motioning to the edge of the bed. I sat down, and she removed the bidet from the chair and sat opposite me. “Now talk,” she said.

“What is it that you want to know? ”

“If you’re not Steve Victor, then who are you?”

For a moment I almost blurted out a protest that I was Steve Victor. But she wouldn’t have believed it, and that way lay only further tickling torture. I decided to improvise. “My name is Boris Karenkov,” I told her.

“Karenkov? Russian! Then you are a Russian agent! But then how is it that you were sent here by the Americans and that you are working with a British agent?”

“I’m a counter-agent,” I elaborated. “I infiltrated the American espionage service.”

“So?” Domino mused. “That explains a lot. But,” she added suspiciously, “how could you convince them that you were Steve Victor when they know very well that Steve Victor is in Manila?”

“I didn’t convince them. They know I’m not Steve Victor. It was the American and British plan to send me to Malta to impersonate Steve Victor to throw S.M.U.T. off the track.”

“I understand that. What I don’t understand is the Russian involvement.”

I pressed my lips together, putting up a pretense of remaining stubbornly mute in the face of being asked to betray a basic allegiance. Domino shifted the gun to her left hand and picked up the feather again. I let my eyes grow very large and trembled a bit to show I was intimidated by the silent threat.

“Now what is your mission for the Russians?” she asked.

My mind raced as I formulated the answer. “To expose S.M.U.T. to the world in such a way as to make it look like a combined plot of the American and British governments,” I told her.

“Aha!” Domino exclaimed.

“Aha!” It was a masculine echo, a familiar voice.

My eyes shot up to the windowsill. Lagula was perched there. He looked quite cool and at ease in an immaculately pressed white linen suit and stylish straw hat. The fingers of one hand were strumming a blowpipe at his lips. I knew from experience that the poisoned dart in the blowpipe could kill on contact.

“Drop the gun!” he told Domino before she had a chance to whirl around.

She did as she was told, her face registering her frustration at having the interrogation cut short just when she was getting what she thought it was she was after from me. I gave her my best "that’s-the-way-the-fortune-cookie-crumbles” shrug and reached for the gun she’d laid down on the bed.

“Keep your hands where they are!” Lagula ordered. My jaw dropped open and I stared at him, not understanding. “Lagula,” I started to say. “You don’t think that -”

“That’s exactly what I think -- comrade,” he added sarcastically.

“Are you nuts? Lagula, this is me, Steve, Steve Victor, your old cloak-and-dagger buddy. Remember?”

“I remember, Comrade Karenkov. And I congratulate the NKVD on how well they’re briefed you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous! I just told her that story so she’d stop tickling me. I made it up as I went along. There’s no truth to it. I really am Steve Victor. You know I’m Steve Victor. For Pete’s sake, my face, my voice--”

“It is fantastic,” Lagula granted. “You could be twin brothers. But Steve Victor is in Manila. And you admitted being a Russian agent named Boris Karenkov. Fortunately, Central Intelligence alerted me to the impersonation this afternoon.”

“What impersonation? What are you talking about?”

“They’re onto you, Karenkov. They know there’s an agent impersonating Steve Victor. They thought it was the man in Manila, but they weren’t sure. They can be sure now, though. The real Steve Victor is in Manila. And you almost succeeded in taking his place in London and carrying through the deception in Malta. I have to admit you had me fooled, Karenkov.”

“But I’m not Karenkov! I am Steve Victor!”

“Really?” My Pigmy friend gave me an “aw-come-on-now!” look. “Then how do you explain your presence here?”

“My presence where? I don’t even know where I am! I thought I just stopped at an ordinary farm. I had no idea this place had anything to do with S.M.U.T.”

“I may be small, but my brain isn’t shrunken, Karenkov. Do you seriously expect me to believe that you just stumbled onto this place? Outside of the S.M.U.T. people, I’m the only one who knew of the connection between this brothel and their organization. I didn’t tell you, so how did you find it? There’s only one answer. Russian Intelligence must have been tailing me these past few days, and they passed on what they learned to you. It’s the only explanation. Unless you’d like me to believe you came here to relieve your libido.”

“I didn’t even know it was a brothel until you mentioned it,” I protested.

“And you expect me to believe you’re Steve Victor? The man from O.R.G.Y.? The world’s foremost authority on cat houses? You expect me to believe that Steve Victor wouldn’t recognize a bawdy house with his pants off and a half-naked prostitute by his side? Don’t tell me you thought she was an innocent farm girl who just happened to find you irresistible?”

“As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what I did think at first.”

“But you did become just a mite suspicious when she tied you up and began torturing you, I suppose,” Lagula said sarcastically.

“Well, naturally—”

“Naturally.”

“Look,” I said desperately, “I just stopped at what I thought was a farmhouse to see how they milked the goats. I had no idea there was any connection between this place and S.M.U.T. And just now I was damn glad to see you because I thought you were rescuing me. I certainly never figured on this attitude. If you aren’t here to help me, then just why are you here, anyway?”

“Your pretense of innocence wouldn’t convince a two- year-old child, comrade. I’m here, as you very well know, because this is the brothel to which I’ve traced the recent outbreak of Malta Fever. I had no idea you were here until I chanced upon this open window and heard you making your confession to the lady.”

“I wasn’t confessing! I was improvising to keep from being tortured any more! ”

“I don’t believe you,” Lagula said flatly. “But it isn’t important at the moment. What is important is that I find out what I can while I have the chance. There is much of interest that this young lady might reveal.”

“I’ll buy that.”

“Good.” Lagula hopped down from the windowsill, strode over to the bed, and hefted the gun. “Then you will cooperate under my direction, and we shall see what the lady has to say.” He waved the gun at me. “Tie her to the bed.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Sauce for the goose . . .”

Under Lagula’s instructions, I tied Domino’s hands and feet to the bedposts so that she was spread-eagled on the bed. With clinical coldness, he ordered me to pull her half-slip up over her waist. Then he made me pick up the goose feather and told me what to do with it.

I’d never tortured anybody before, and I didn’t particularly like the idea of starting now. Still, with Lagula holding that gun on me, I had no choice but to do as he ordered. And there was a sort of justice in reversing the situation this way.

Lagula had me begin by stroking the tip of her right breast with the feather. Very quickly the bright maroon tip became enlarged and quivered in the air. The pale pink roseate encircling it seemed to widen and take on color under the stroking feather.

“Who is the S.M.U.T. contact in Malta?” Lagula asked.

Domino didn’t respond. He had me switch to the other breast. She was breathing very fast, but her lips were sealed. She didn’t even laugh, as I had before. She wasn’t ticklish, I guess.

“Who do you take your orders from? ” When there was no response, Lagula sighed and indicated that I should apply the feather to her navel.

Domino’s svelte belly rippled slightly under this new caress. Her eyes were shut tightly now. The muscles of her thighs were flexing a bit. But the only sound she made was her increasingly heavy breathing.

“What is the purpose behind the deliberate spreading of Malta Fever?”

It was as if Domino didn’t hear the questions. It was as if she felt no need to make a sound in response to the delicate torture she was undergoing. Lagula grimaced and indicated the thickly curl-covered target he wanted me to attack next.

Domino’s buttocks flexed under her as the feather investigated the curls. Her body arched as if to deliberately make the target more accessible. Her thighs strained against the bonds holding her in an effort to part more widely .

“Tell me what you know about this latest S.M.U.T. plot!” Lagula demanded. But she remained obstinate, and he ordered me to dip the feather to the center of what he supposed was a more vulnerable target.

Finally Domino moaned under this most intimate torture.

“She’ll talk now,” Lagula said positively. “Keep it up.”

Having just undergone a similar torment, I was sure he was right. I didn’t see how Domino could hold out against the exquisitely agonizing sensation she must be undergoing. Surely she couldn’t stand it for long; surely she would break; surely she would talk. As her body began to writhe wildly, Lagula and I became absolutely sure that she was about to succumb. Surely it was more than human flesh could bear.

But we were wrong. We hadn’t stopped to recognize that there is human flesh and there is human flesh. We never expected what happened.

“Now! Now! Now!” Domino screamed suddenly. Her body thrust upward so hard that her bonds cut furrows in her flesh. “Ah! Ah! Ah!” she yelled. “Yes! Yes! Yes!” She strained that way for a long moment. Then—“Again! Do it again! Again! Again! Again! ”

I extracted the feather and stood back to look at it. Some torture gimmick! It hadn’t tortured Domino at all. It had only spurred her on to a realization of ultimate pleasure.

Which all goes to prove that one man’s torture may be one woman’s joy!

chapter three

“HA-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! ”

Now she laughed! Not because she was tickled, but because she was malicious! There was nothing uncontrollable about her laughter. It was deliberate, and it was aimed at us. She was laughing in our faces.

“You’d better read up on your de Sade,” I told Lagula. “I don’t think you’re going to make her talk this way.”

“It doesn’t seem to be having the desired effect,” Lagula admitted.

“It’s having an effect,” I assured him. “But definitely not the desired one.”

“I wonder why . . .” he mused.

“She just doesn’t have the right kind of sense of humor. What tickles some people just doesn’t tickle others.”

“And what tortures some people just doesn’t torture others,” he agreed. “I’m afraid you’re right. We’ll just have to try something else. But this isn’t the time and place to do it. Untie her. I’ll have to take her somewhere where she can be interrogated at my leisure.”

“Are you really going to torture her?”

“And why not? Surely that shouldn’t shock a Russian like you. You’re not noted for your gentleness in handling espionage cases.”

“But I’m not a Russian. I’m Steve--”

“Enough now!” Lagula barked. “Finish untying her, and let’s get out of here.” He waved the gun at me.

“No more?” Domino sounded genuinely regretful.

“Out the window!” Lagula ignored her.

“Aren’t you going to give us a chance to put on our clothes?” I objected.

“Here.” He tossed me my pants and shirt. “Hurry up

While I put them on, Domino pulled on her black dress. Then the two of us preceded Lagula out the window. He prodded us toward my rented Porsche. I drove with Domino beside me. Lagula stood up on the jumpseat behind, holding the gun he’d taken from Domino trained on us. I backed onto the road, and that’s when the fun started.

A sleek Mercedes coupe shot silently out onto the road from the front of the farmhouse and started after us. There was a dull ping from the left side of the Porsche’s rear deck, and I realized that somebody in the Mercedes was shooting at us. I didn’t need Lagula’s urging to go faster. I slammed down the clutch, threw the shift lever from second into overdrive, and hit the floorboard with the gas pedal. The Porsche went flat-out like a bullet down the straightaway road.

The Mercedes didn’t have the immediate pickup to stay with our roadster. Momentarily, it dropped back. But they didn’t stop shooting while they tried to catch up. With the convertible top down, the sound of the bullets was lost in the wind roaring past our ears.

“This is just going to take the curl right out of my hair,” Domino complained.

Just like a woman! A hundred miles an hour with a curve rushing toward us in the distance and bullets nipping at the night air, and she was worried about her hair. From the corner of my eye I saw that it was streaming out and up wildly—an excellent target for the marksman in the Mercedes. “Get down on the floor,” I told her.

It was easier said than done. What with the bucket seats and the stick shift and the hump for the driveshaft, there wasn’t a helluva lot of room down there. But somehow Domino folded herself up like a pretzel and squinched down.

The result was that her dress fell completely away from her long, intriguing legs. Depending on how the moonlight hit her, it was quite a view I had from the corner of my eye. One moment it was oscillating and gynecological, the next quivering and cheeky. Quite a view!

But I had no time to appreciate it. That sharp curve in the road was almost upon us. No car manufactured corners like a Porsche, but at 100 mph I knew I’d have to brake hard and pray to make it on even two wheels. I’d have to hug the mountain on one side and ignore the sharp drop into an abyss on the other.

The Mercedes was closing the gap as I hit the brake and leaned my weight on the steering wheel. The bullets were zeroing in on us, and I could hear their little pings now as they ricocheted off the body of the Porsche. I was damn grateful to the manufacturers for providing the Porsche with an all-steel body. The rear engine would definitely have been shot out of commission without it.

I screeched into the curve without down-shifting. My right foot bounced back and forth between the brake pedal and the gas pedal as I tried to maintain a delicate balance between safety and escape. Domino was thrown over to my side of the car, and for a moment she was all tangled up with my feet. When I went to slam down on the gas pedal for good as we came out of the curve, I stomped on her breast by accident. It had the same effect, anyway, for it crushed her to the fioorboard so that her shoulder blade depressed the gas pedal all the way. I pulled out the throttle and kept my hand on it so I could shove it back in quickly when we hit the next fast-approaching curve.

A glance in the rear-view mirror revealed two things. It showed Lagula grabbing wildly and managing to pull himself back into the car after having almost bounced out. The effect was almost of the little Pigmy waving in the wind like some unfurled trophy pennant. And the mirror also showed that the heavier Mercedes was hugging the curve and closing the gap between us even more as it came out of it.

Lagula was game as ever. Bouncing around like a ping-pong ball, he still managed to snap a shot at the Mercedes as we two-wheeled it into the second curve. The shot connected, but it didn’t do much damage. The windshield must have been bulletproof. It shattered without actually breaking.

We leaped out of the second curve and were on a straightaway again. But it was a mountainous straight-away. Up one hill, down another, then up again and down again. The Porsche roared, and the Mercedes purred behind it. They were an even match for speed. The six-cylinder Porsche with its six carbs was whining up towards the 140-mph mark, but the heavier, eight-cylinder Mercedes was sticking like glue. They couldn’t close the distance, but I couldn’t put much more between us, either.

Lagula was shooting for their tires, but the driver of the other car was following my lead and zigzagging erratically so he wouldn’t present a clear target. Logic told me that the only way it could end was if either a stray bullet connected or one of us made a snap-second misjudgment and slammed into the mountain or over the cliff. But logic—-as if often the case—didn’t dictate the ending.

Gas did. Fuel—petrol, that is. I ran out of it.

The motor started sputtering. I looked at the gas gauge. The needle was hovering about halfway below the quarter-tank mark. I thought fast. I remembered that on the Porsche this was a warning signal. It meant it was time to switch over to the auxiliary tank, in which there were always three or four extra gallons. My right hand shot down for the handle to open it.

I grabbed Domino’s right breast and twisted mightily.

“Ouch!” she exclaimed.

“Get the hell out of the way!”

“I can’t.”

“Then turn the—” I didn’t bother finishing the sentence. The motor was already coughing and losing speed. The rear-view mirror told me that the Mercedes was almost on us. I changed tactics quickly.

I twisted the wheel to the left, toward the mountain, and stomped the brake hard. The Mercedes shot past, bullets flying from it wildly. I spun the wheel hard back to the right and slammed into the rear of the coupe with the front of the Porsche.

I had to take my hat off to that driver. If his reflexes had been a split second slower, the Mercedes would have gone hurtling over the side of the cliff. As it was, he managed to skid it into a spin that ended with him slamming into a tree about fifty feet past where I’d managed to stop the Porsche.

By that time the three of us were out of the car and scrambling up the mountainside to the shelter of a copse of scraggly trees. I was in the lead with Domino behind and Lagula bringing up the rear. He was still covering us with the gun; we were still his prisoners.

Once we got in among the trees, though, the situation changed instantly. Some clouds blotted out the moon, and Domino took advantage of the sudden darkness to dart away into the shadows of the trees. Lagula cursed and tried to follow her, which left me all alone. He realized very quickly that he’d lost her, and so he turned his attention back to me. But by that time I had done some realizing myself. Considering Lagula’s skeptical attitude toward me, I could see no advantage to remaining his prisoner. So I picked myself a handy tree and swung up into the concealment of its branches. From there I watched Lagula moving from tree to tree in an effort to find either Domino or me.

Meanwhile the occupants of the Mercedes were following our path up the hillside. There were five of them, all men. The moon was out again now, and their gun-carrying silhouettes looked very ominous as they approached the fringe of the woods where we were hiding. I had a ringside seat for what followed after their shadows merged with the trees.

One of them spotted Lagula, and there was a lightning gunflash as he loosed a shot at him. The little man sprawled, gathered himself up, and bounced like a piece of Silly Putty. At first I thought he might have been hit, hut if he was, it sure didn’t slow him down. He was a white blur moving from tree to tree until he had gotten behind the man who shot at him. Only then did he fire in return. His opponent crashed to the ground with a will-less thud that marked him a corpse.

Two of the others whirled around and opened fire in the direction where Lagula had been. But it was a case of the little man who wasn’t there. By the time their bullets were desecrating the scenery, he was back behind the tree I was hiding in again and reloading.

It was about this time that Domino made contact with the hunters. I was too far away to hear, but I saw her approach one pair of them cautiously. They must have heard her coming, for they whirled and almost fired before they saw who it was. When they did, however, they seemed to readily accept her as an ally. I saw the glint of a gun handed to her, and a moment later she joined them in the cautious search for their quarry.

The quarry-—Lagula—was as elusive as the wiliest fox. I suppose I too might have been considered fair prey, but I was strictly a noncombatant perched safely in my tree-haven. Lagula, however, was playing the game with a vengeance.

Having reloaded the gun, he again tried to make a wide circle to get behind his opponents. This time he didn’t quite make it. They spotted him darting across a rather wide space between ‘two trees and opened fire. I almost laughed aloud at the bloody idiocy of what happened.

Seemingly, they had him in a crossfire, trapped between three of them on one side of the clearing and two on the other. They’d realized by then that this was a very short man indeed, and so they were aiming low. But Lagula fooled them with a series of—-so help me!—-gazelle-like leaps that carried him over the first barrage of shots. He grabbed an overhanging vine and swung safely over the barrage that followed.

And that’s the thing about a crossfire in the dark. If it misses its mark, it’s very likely to kick up the dust around gunmen supposedly on the same side. That’s what happened now. One of them was winged in the ankle. As he fell, he cursed loudly, and anger must have made him lose his head for a moment. He drilled one of his fellow hoods across the clearing straight between the eyes.

“Hold your fire!” one of the remaining men shouted authoritatively. In the silence that followed, Lagula’s loud chuckle rang out over the area.

I watched as the remaining foursome huddled in the shelter of the trees. The man who’d been hit in the ankle was helped to his feet. He put his arm around Domino’s shoulder, and she helped him start to hobble back down the hillside to the Mercedes. The other two split up to continue the hunt. One of them was wearing the Basque beret favored by the native Maltese. He was a small, lithe man and had the flowing moustaches typical of them. The other was larger, bulkier, and seemed to have on some sort of uniform.

The Maltese spotted Lagula crouching behind an outcropping of rock. He opened fire, and Lagula shot back. The larger man crept up on Lagula from another angle and also started shooting. For a moment it was like a Coney Island shooting gallery with the sitting ducks shooting back.

But Lagula was one sitting duck who was fast running out of ammo. They had him pinned down, but strategically they couldn’t move in on his sheltered position as long as he was able to shoot back. But then he stopped shooting back. When they started for him and he threw the empty revolver at one of them, I realized his predicament.

In a moment they’d have him—dead or alive, and they didn’t seem to care much one way or the other—if I didn’t act. So I acted. What the hell, Lagula might have pegged me as a traitor, but I knew better. I knew which side my I-spy bread was buttered on. He was my friend and my ally, and I had to do what I could to save him.

I was unarmed, so the only thing I could do was create a distraction. The shoot-up party was about twenty feet away from the tree in which I was hiding. As they started for Lagula, I stood up on the branch and dived.

I covered half the distance to them skidding on my belly. The two men whirled around and started shooting as I dived into the bushes off to one side. When they realized they’d lost me, they turned back to Lagula again.

I stood up and thumbed my nose at them. “You missed me! You missed me!” I sang out. I dived back into the bushes before they could start firing with any accuracy again.

They were too fast for Lagula, though. He tried to dive for the bushes himself, but they turned firing, and he had to plunge back behind the shelter of the rocks. They started for him again, and again I bounced up shouting.

“You can’t catch me! You can’t catch me!” I jumped up and down until I’d drawn their fire and then managed to disappear again.

They went into a huddle. The strategy they’d planned became apparent the next time they started closing in on Lagula, and I found it necessary to act up again. This time only the larger man responded to my jack-in-the-box appearance and insulting cackling.

“Ringalevio! Ringalevio! One-two-three! One-two-three!” I hollered. “First one shoots is a rotten egg! ”

I overdid it. The big fellow shot. “You’re a rotten egg!” I yelled, bouncing into view again. I should have looked first. While I’d been down, he’d moved fast. Now I practically landed in his arms as I jumped up. He waved the gun under my nose, and I reached for the stars.

My jaw dropped open as I recognized my captor. But I didn’t have time to dwell on it because, like him, I was struck by the sudden silence back where Lagula had been. He wasn’t there any more, but the Maltese was. He was sprawled face-up over the rocks, and he didn’t have his gun any more. There was a small poisoned dart neatly embedded in the exact center of his throat. It was the mark of a Maltese fall guy—deceased as deceased could be.

Lagula’s voice broke the silence. Neither my captor nor myself could tell from where it was coming. “Good-bye for now, Comrade Karenkov,” he called. "Thanks for your help. Sorry I can’t guarantee to return it. But if you ever want to really defect, let me know and I’ll try to help you.”

“Lagula, you idiot!” I called back. “I’m Steve Victor. Help me.”

“Sorry! First things first.”

A few minutes later I appreciated what he meant by that. He’d crept up on the Mercedes and, using the gun he’d lifted from the dead Maltese, he’d taken Domino and the wounded man prisoner. My own captor and I watched as he led them to the Porsche.

“Want to swap?” Lagula called up.

My captor didn’t answer. I had the feeling he might have answered with a bullet, but it was too far away for him to shoot with any accuracy.

Lagula’s shrug said he recognized that his offer had been turned down. He put bullets through two of the tires on the Mercedes and got back into the jump seat of the Porsche. Domino was driving and his gun was nuzzling the hair at the nape of her neck as they pulled off down the road. I guessed they’d had no trouble switching to the auxiliary gas tank.

“Harumph!” My captor cleared his throat. “It seems that we must face up to a rather long walk, Mr. Victor,” he said.

“Seems so,” I agreed. “Life certainly is full of surprises, isn’t it? I never would have figured you to be involved in S.M.U.T.” I didn’t bother trying to hide my surprise at finding myself the prisoner of Major Dwight Worthby of the Malta garrison of Her Brittanic Majesty’s Royal Army. “Just how do you figure in all this, anyway?”

“I’ll ask the questions, Mr. Victor. Start walking.” He nudged me with the gun.

And ask the questions he did as we trudged down the hillside to the road and then back up the road toward the farmhouse I’d fled only a short while before. But the questions he asked surprised me, and once again I found myself not only without any answers, but also without any facts worth concealing from him.

“Who is the Prince?” Major Worthby wanted to know.

“Huh?”

“What is he Prince of?” he asked.

“I don’t think I understand—”

“What was his mission in London?”

“What the devil are-—?”

“What sort of agreement did he come to with the Home Office?” he persisted.

“I’m completely conf-”

“Oh, come now, Mr. Victor,” he said impatiently, prodding me with the gun to take longer steps as we marched up the road. “I overheard enough in the casino so that it’s ridiculous for you to pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. Now, S.M.U.T. has a vital interest in Malta-—for reasons that are none of your business. It’s important to me to know just what changes in the military setup here are due to transpire at the behest of some foreign potentate. So suppose we start all over again and you stop trying to play innocent. Just who is this Prince?”

By now it had clicked. All these questions had to do with the put-on Lagula and I had indulged in just for the hell of it when we’d first encountered Major Worthby in the casino. The Major, it was now obvious, had swallowed our little fun-dialogue hook, line, and sinker. He thought he’d stumbled onto something important, and now he wanted “the facts” behind it. It was ludicrous, but I knew that he’d never in a million years believe the truth. So that’s what I told him—the absolute truth.

“Who is the Prince?” He repeated the question.

“He’s an African Pigmy from Rhodesia—from the interior, the bush country, that is.”

“You are in no position to attempt levity, Mr. Victor. Now-—just what is the nation of which he is a Prince?”

“It’s the remnants of a Pigmy tribe which was almost wiped out in an earthquake. It consists of five young females. All pregnant at the present time, I believe.”

“I’m warning you, Mr. Victor!”

“It’s the absolute truth! Boy Scout’s honor!”

“Do you seriously expect me to believe that the British government would concern itself with the representative of some small, decimated, savage Pigmy tribe? Am I supposed to swallow that such a personage as you describe could affect military policy?”

“Not at all,” I assured him. “He did no such thing. There were no conferences with the government. He is not a Prince-—at least not in the sense you seem to take it. What he is, actually, is a spy!”

“A spy? An African Pigmy spying for the British in Malta! You will regret playing cat-and-mouse with me like this, Mr. Victor. We have ways of making people talk, as you shall see!”

From then on we marched in grim silence. The idea, I suppose, was to allow my mind to dwell on some of those “ways of making people talk.” But just in case my imagination failed me, I was reminded of one of them the moment we were back inside the farmhouse-—or brothel-- or whatever it was.

Madam Renado was waiting for us in a private room. Her eyes surveyed me coldly as we entered; She was holding the goose feather in one hand and stroking the palm of the other hand with it. Oh, no! Not again! I thought. I had to stop myself from giggling hysterically — just from anticipation.

“So you managed to recapture him,” she greeted Major Worthby.

“Yes. But unfortunately the Prince got away.”

“If you mean that Pigmy,” the Madam told him, “he is not a Prince. We have learned that he is a Rhodesian native in the employ of the British Intelligence Service.”

“I told you so!” I couldn’t resist saying.

Major Worthby shot me a cold glance. “You have an unfortunate tendency to remind me of my wife,” he informed me. “For that reason, watching you being tortured will give me double pleasure, Mr. Victor.”

“And he is not Steve Victor,” the Madam interrupted. “Steve Victor is in Manila. This man is an impostor.”

“But if he’s not Steve Victor, then who is he?”

“That’s what we have to find out.” Madam Renado twirled the goose feather meaningfully. “But perhaps he will tell us of his own free will.”

Well, why not? I’d had a chance to rehearse my story once. It figured to be really polished by now. “Put your feather back in its holster,” I told her. “I’ll talk. I can’t stand any more of that. I know when I’ve had enough.”

“Very well. Talk. Who are you and what are you after?”

“I’m a Russian agent. My name is Boris Karenkov. My mission is to expose S.M.U.T. to the world as a tool of British-American imperialism.”

“Haw-haw-haw-haw!” What I’d said was evidently a real thigh-slapper to Major Dwight Worthby, so he slapped his thigh. “Now isn’t that just like the bloody Bolsheviks? Here the Western powers are after our scalp, and they come up with a plot to prove we’re allies. You have to hand it to them. They’re ingenious!”

“Then you believe him?” Madam Renado asked. “Yes. It’s just the sort of convoluted thing the Russkies would cook up. Don’t you think so? ”

“I’m not sure,” Madam Renado said cautiously. “But we’ll have to keep him alive until we can check it out, I suppose.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” I interjected.

Madam Renado ignored me. “I’ll have him locked in the cellar,” she told Worthby.

And so, a short while later, I found myself locked in a cell which looked like it had once been a coal bin. It was a small cubicle with cement walls on three sides and a stout wooden door which was barred and locked on the fourth. There was no furniture at all in this makeshift cell. High up in the wall opposite the wooden door, there was a small window. It was barred. Outside of it, the shadow of the lower part of shapely female legs was visible. I guessed that one of the S.M.U.T. girls must have been posted as a sentry there.

There was nothing else to do, so I curled up on the cold cement floor and tried to get some shuteye. It was no bed of roses, but it had been a long day and I was tired, so despite my back-breaking mattress I managed to doze off. I don’t know how much time passed before I was awakened.

What woke me up was a hissing sound coming from the window. I opened my eyes and saw a narrow flashlight beam shining into the cell from between the bars. The angle was difficult, and the beam was purposely low-powered, so it only cut through the air at about the height of a standing man and didn’t reach the floor or catch me in its glare. The hissing sound was repeated.

“Yeah?” I responded.

“Comrade Karenkov?” It was a female whisper.

“Yeah.”

There was a torrent of whispered words, none of which I recognized. I guessed she was talking Russian.

“Do you want to give us away?” I thought fast. “Speak English.”

“Da. I’m sorry. But nobody can hear us.”

“Then why are you whispering? ”

“Well, just in case—”

“Exactly. And if they should hear the sound of Russian, even if they can’t make out the words, it will alert them more quickly than the murmur of English. Now, who are you?”

“My name is Tanya. I am a Russian agent like yourself. I am here to help you escape.”

Well, whaddaya know? It looked like at long last my Russian spy story might pay off some worthwhile dividends. And just when I’d about made up my mind that the fabrication was strictly an out-of-the-frying-pan into-the-fire gambit. “Okay,” I told Tanya. “How do we work it?”

“Come closer to the window so I can whisper in your ear.”

I stood up and stretched so that my face was directly in front of the bars.

“You are really a Russian agent?” she asked, shining the flashlight straight into my eyes.

“I am. And stop pointing that thing at me like that, will you? ”

She angled the flashlight slightly and I saw that in her other hand she was holding a double-barreled shotgun. Almost casually, as if she wasn’t thinking of what she was doing, Tanya pointed it at me. “You are a Russian agent and you have told them everything about your mission, she said, her voice peculiar in that it lacked any inflection at all.

“Hey, what are you -?”

“Your are a traitor!” she said, poking the cold twin muzzles of the shotgun against my forehead. “And now you must die! ”

From the corner of my eye, I saw her finger span both triggers and tighten. . . .

chapter four

IT STARTED with a kiss. That was the only way I could keep Tanya’s mouth shut. And if I didn’t keep it shut, I’d be one dead knight -- armor or no armor.

Outside the suit of armor, S.M.U.T. hirelings were running to and fro with blood in their eye. They were looking for the escaped prisoner—-me——and their orders were to shoot on sight and shoot to kill. The hunt was on, and I was the quarry.

Inside the suit of armor, things were more than a bit crowded. If I stood on tiptoe, I could see through the visor of the helmet and watch the activity outside. But I couldn’t take the chance of standing on my toes. Instead, I had to crouch to kiss Tanya. It wasn’t passion -- at first. It was necessity. If I didn’t cover her mouth with mine, she was all too eager to scream and give away our hiding- lace.

I couldn’t stop her with my hands, or any other way, because of the awkward position the confines of the armor imposed on me. It was awkward as hell! My arms were held rigid by the steel-plated arms of the suit of armor. My legs were held equally rigid. I was facing front. Tanya was standing on my feet facing me, circumstances keeping her almost but not quite as immobile as I was.

I’d always heard that knights of old were smaller on the average than the men of today. Fortunately, this couldn’t have been true of the knight for whom this particular suit of armor was intended. He must have been a giant of a man, else Tanya and I would never have been able to share his armor suit.

Tanya, as I’ve indicated, was sharing it unwillingly. To make sure I didn’t forget her reluctance, she responded to my kiss by tearing savagely at my lower lip with her small, sharp teeth. I bit back and drew a muffled Cold War groan from my Russian adversary. She stopped biting, so I stopped biting, too. But I kept on kissing. You can’t trust these Russians.

The position had forced not only our lips but also our bodies into the closest proximity. Because of the way the legs of the armor had been positioned, our feet were spaced wide apart, our legs were parallel, and our pelvises were crushed together. Our upper bodies were also pasted together.

With the prolonged kiss, I became aware of Tanya’s small, sharp breasts digging into my chest. She was wearing the typical black Maltese dress with no bra under it, and the tips of her breasts were growing hotter and harder as I maintained the kiss. Slowly her lips relaxed and parted. Reflex action found the tip of my tongue responding and investigating.

Because of the way I’d initially shoved her into the suit of armor, her arms were bent at the elbows, the palms pressed back on either side of her head and facing me at just the height of her shoulders. She managed to move them slightly now as her own tongue dueled with mine for a series of little, lightning-like thrills. Aroused, her sex was fluttering against my manhood which was arching rigidly in response. As the movement of these parts of our bodies took on a basic rhythm, she grasped my shoulders with her hands and began pulling herself up so that the contact would be more direct.

This resulted in several things happening—some of which she must have calculated. The first was that her weight was no longer so painfully on my feet, where she had been standing, but now was suspended from my shoulders, where its more equal distribution made it easier to bear. Then, as she began actually chinning herself, using my shoulders for leverage, and grinding against me with all her strength, I realized that she was pushing my trousers down from my waist. She manage to get her knees around my hips and continued the movements until my pants were down around the middle of my thighs. After that, she varied it slightly, leaning away, rather than toward me, until she’d managed to push her skirt up above her muscular but slender legs.

Before going along with it all the way, I took a chance and broke off the kiss so that I could raise my head and peek through the visor at the large room outside. The S.M.U.T. kiddies were still flinging open doors and pushing aside furniture in their search for me. But they weren’t, thank goodness, showing any interest in the suit of armor.

Tanya had arranged things by now. She took a deep, trembling breath which inflated her breasts and crushed them against me like toy balloons, locked her hands around my neck, and pulled herself up as high as she could. Her legs circled my waist and the ankles locked as she lowered herself. I had to kiss her again so her cry of satisfaction wouldn’t be heard when she impaled herself to the very hilt.

She began bouncing up and down gently now. A good part of her weight was resting on the instrument of her impalement. It felt a little like being weighted down with fiery, melting, clutching marshmallow. Because of the confined position, the only way I could respond was with a rotating movement that was raising a blister on my buttocks as they rubbed against the armor. But I soon forgot about the blister.

I forgot about the threat from S.M.U.T. outside, too. I forgot about everything except the wild, crazy sensations as Tanya sheathed and unsheathed my dagger with increasingly more abandoned movements. My rotating response was driving her berserk with passion. It felt as if I was in the grip of a pulsating, vise-like valve. Only the furnace of sensation into which I’d been plunged existed as we pounded our flesh against each other and approached the explosion of our lust.

And then it exploded. The feeling was so intense that I don’t think either of us was aware that our letting go was rocking the suit of armor precariously. By the time this fact penetrated my own awareness, it was too late. The armor suit toppled, and we crashed w1th it. My skull crunched into something cold and hard, and I took a high dive straight to the blacker-than-black bottom of the inkwell.

I came out of it very slowly, the insides of my shut eyelids still coated with the black ink, the slippery eel of consciousness which was my mind skidding back into the recent past. There was a crash echoing in my ears, but it wasn’t the crash of the armor; it was the crash of a wooden door splintering under the blast of a double-barreled shotgun.

I struggled with the memory, trying to make some sense of it. Now let’s see . . .”

“And now you must die!” That’s what Tanya had said as she poked the shotgun through the bars of the window and up against my forehead.

I’d seen her finger span both triggers and start to tighten. I’d ducked my head just as it went off, grabbed the barrel with both hands, and yanked hard. The blast had made the wood of the door splinter, but it still seemed as firmly closed as before. It was a stout door, and with the lock on the other side where I couldn’t even see it, I judged my chances of shooting it open were nil.

Still, I had to do something fast. The sound of the blast was sure to bring guards down around my neck 1n a hurry. I turned back to the window, placed the muzzle of the gun against the spot where one of the bars was joined to the cement, and fired. I repeated it with the next bar. After that I was able to push them easily out of their sockets. It was a close squeeze, and I left some skin behind, but I managed to pull myself up and out of the window.

Tanya was waiting for me as I emerged. The Russian girl wasn’t as much of a fool as she’d seemed at first. She’d picked up one of the steel bars I’d knocked out of the window and flattened herself against the wall. Now, as I was pulling myself out, she swung the bar down hard, straight for the base of my skull.

The only thing that saved me is the fact that I have excellent peripheral vision. I sensed, more than saw, the weapon swinging down at me, and flung myself out the window and to one side. It hit right where my head had been. But by then it was too late for Tanya to try another swing. Where my neck is concerned, I don’t give second chances. I rolled over and pointed the shotgun at her. She froze. There was nothing else she could do.

I relieved her of her flashlight and shone the beam on her. For the first time I had a really good look at the Russian girl. It went a long way toward convincing me of the advantages of East-West coexistence.

Tanya was a pint-sized pile of well-sculpted Russian caviar spiced to petite perfection. Maybe an inch over five feet, she was as sizzling a Molotov cocktail of sex appeal as ever rolled through the Iron Curtain. Her hair was short and brown and combed like a boy’s. But that was the only boylike thing about her.

Her features were round and well-chiseled and extremely feminine. The eyes were dark, deep-set, serious, and covered with long fluttering lashes. Her cheekbones were high, slight hollows which framed a mouth that managed to be both sullen and inviting at the same time. Her jawline was firm but rounded.

She stood with her hands on top of her head now as a gesture of surrender to the shotgun I held on her. The position made the black Malta dress she was wearing pull tightly over her figure and hike up well above her knees. They were very nice knees with non-Communist dimples, and the thigh-flesh above her rolled stockings was almost decadently flushed. Even with the thick stockings, I could see that her legs were well-shaped and femininely muscular like the legs of a professional dancer. Little did I guess then that those muscles would soon be flexing to insure the legs a grip around my body.

Her hips were very wide, well-padded without being heavy. The waist above them was tiny, so tiny that it made her small breasts seem larger than they really were. Nor did their smallness in any way detract from their sensual appeal. They were pear-shaped, uptilted breasts, and even without seeing them unveiled, I judged that their tips would be sharp and high. Also sharp was the cleavage between the breasts which made each of them seem an individual lure to be caressed.

But I had no thought of stopping to caress them then. My major concern was to get away from this place—and fast. I didn’t know where Tanya fitted into all that was happening, but there was no time to worry about that now. The question was what to do with her. I could already hear the door back in the cell being pushed open in response to the roar of the shotgun. Whatever I was going to do, I’d better do it.

I could knock her unconscious with the butt end of the shotgun and leave her there. Or I could force her to come with me. I decided on the second course. If I made my escape, I might be able to learn something of value from her later. So I nudged her belly-button with the shotgun to indicate that she should start moving.

I decided we should keep close to the side of the house until we rounded the corner. From that side it would be a shorter dash to the road. Meanwhile the shadows concealed us.

But when we rounded the corner of the house, it was like stepping into a General Electric lighting demonstration. No less than four powerful flashlight beams hit us all at the same time. “There he is!” The shout went up. I grabbed Tanya’s arm and yanked her back the way we’d come.

They were right behind us. And halfway down the wall in front of us, a door suddenly opened and another flashlight beam hit us head-on. I dived for it. The girl behind it had a gun, but my sudden lunge spoiled her aim. I knocked her out with a quick punch, pointed the shotgun at Tanya, and the two of us went through the door.

We were in a long hallway. Pulling Tanya with me, I raced for one end of it. There were footsteps behind us, but I didn’t turn around to look at our pursuers. They got off the first shots just as we went through the door.

It was an immense room, and it was filled with the most unbelievable junk. There were old pirates’ chests and piles of various kinds of costumes and half-opened wardrobe closets containing harem girl outfits and Arab sheik robes and boots and whips and lingerie and eighteenth century French-style evening gowns and Elizabethan men’s wear and bikinis and jockstraps and sequined G-strings and lots more besides. There were also a lot of boxes and crates, some opened, some not. There was furniture in the room, too—beds and chairs and sofas-—-all covered over with velvet drop-cloths.

“What is this place?” I asked Tanya.

“It’s the prop room.”

“The prop room? I don’t get it.”

“This is a very fancy brothel,” she told me. “It’s famous for satisfying any sort of whim the customer may have. Many like to dress up and play-act while making love. Others like sadism and other perversions with a really authentic period flavor. All of these tastes require props to satisfy them. This is the room where they store the props.”

“Is there another way out of here?”

“No.” Tanya sounded glad.

“Then we have to hide,” I decided. “And fast,” I added as the sound of running footsteps came closer.

That’s when I pushed her into the suit of armor and fastened it behind us. A moment later the room was knee-deep in S.M.U.T. . . .

And it still was, now, as my aching brain emerged from its fog and managed the step from past to present. S.M.U.T. was the first thing I saw now as I blinked my eyes open. I saw it in the persons of Madam Renado and Major Dwight Worthby. They were bending over the pile of collapsed armor and staring down at Tanya and me. Each of them was holding a nice, fat gun. Major Worthby was the first to speak.

“My word, sir,” he said, his eyes trailing down my body to where my pants had fallen, and then up Tanya’s legs to where there were still visible traces of our recent pastime. “You really must be the man from O.R.G.Y. Who else would--?”

“We’ve been all through that already, Major,” the madam interrupted. “He is not the man from O.R.G.Y. He is not Steve,Victor. He is an impostor.”

“Traitor!” Tanya murmured, pulling down her skirt. “Decadent lecher! Rapist!”

“Has anybody got an aspirin?” I asked. “My head is killing me.”

They ignored me. Understandably, for suddenly they had trouble—big trouble—-noisy trouble.

It was announced by a series of wailing sirens right out of Gangbusters. Everybody froze, and before they could unfreeze, there was a short, staccato of tommygun fire and then the place was lousy with cops. It all happened so fast I was still struggling to pull my pants up as the gendarmes lined us up against the wall.

“What’s the meaning of this?” Major Worthby was sputtering.

“A vice raid, Major.” The Maltese police lieutenant who seemed to be in charge was quite deferential. But not so deferential as to return the Major’s gun which his men had taken, along with Madam Renado’s, when they’d barged into the prop room.

“A vice raid!” Madam Renado was even more agitated than the Major. “How dare you? I pay for protection regularly. Does the Commissioner know about this?”

“It was he who ordered the raid,” the lieutenant told her.

“Just a moment now!” the Major continued protesting. “You are from the Valletta constabulary, aren’t you? Then what are you doing here? This place is outside the city limits. You have no jurisdiction! I demand to see whoever’s responsible for this outrage! I am a British officer in the service of Her Majesty, the Queen! I demand to see the man in charge!”

“And so you shall,” the lieutenant assured him. “The Commissioner is waiting to see all of you back at headquarters.”

There were several paddy wagons waiting outside the farmhouse. The brothel girls were being loaded into them. Our little group—the Major, the madam, Tanya, myself, and three or four other S.M.U.T. people who’d been in the prop room at the moment of the raid—rated a van all to ourselves. Four armed police guards rode in the back with us as we sped back to Valletta.

When we reached police headquarters, the four of us were separated from the other girls. It seemed we rated being received by the Commissioner himself. He wasn’t alone as we were ushered into his large office.

“Lagula!” I greeted my Pigmy friend, who was seated to one side of the Commissioner’s desk. “Am I glad to see you! ”

“Really, Comrade?” he answered sarcastically. “I can’t imagine why!”

I replied with a plea for understanding, but it was lost in the hubbub created by my companions.

“I pay you off like clockwork, and you have the nerve to—” Madam Renado was shouting at the Commissioner.

“I demand to see the British Consul at once!” Major Worthby was drowning her out.

“I swear that I am not now and have never been a member of the Communist Party,” Tanya was muttering.

“Quiet!” the Commissioner roared. “See that there is quiet!” he instructed the guards.

They moved in on us ominously. There was quiet.

“Now,” the Commissioner said in a softer voice. “Let us get down to cases. You, Madam,” he told Madam Renado, “are under arrest on a charge of subversive activity -- and possibly treason.”

“What?” She drew herself up haughtily. “Don’t be ridiculous! I’m a hard-working businesswoman! What do I know of subversive activity? You are well acquainted with my profession,” she told the Commissioner meaningfully. “You know precisely what I deal in. How dare you drag me in here on some trumped-up charge?”

“We have evidence to support it,” he told her firmly. “A deathbed confession linking you to an underground organization known as S.M.U.T. According to this confession, by one Domino Diego, your whole operation is nothing but a front for this organization. Now, my dear, a little vice is one thing. We in this oflice are understanding and tolerant of—”

“For a price! ” Madam Renado interrupted bitterly.

“Your counter-accusations needn’t concern us at the moment,” the Commissioner overruled her smoothly. “As I was saying, a bit of illicit sex is one thing, but treason is something else again. The charge against you is most serious. My advice to you is to confess all and throw yourself on the mercy of the authorities.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Madam Renado clamped her jaws firmly shut and lapsed into silence.

“I trust that you will relinquish your stubbornness,” the Commissioner told her. “We shall see that you have plenty of time to think over the advantages of doing so. Take her away for now,” he ordered the guards.

As she was being led out, Major Worthby erupted again. “I am a British officer, and I demand—”

“You may tell your demands to your own government,” the Commissioner cut him off. “They are most anxious to speak with you. According to this Domino Diego, you are the one who handed out the orders for S.M.U.T. in Malta. Her testimony links you with a certain illegal cargo of faulty contraceptives and with Madam Renado’s operation as well. You are to be returned to London under guard immediately. There you can explain the extent of your activities. And perhaps you will explain the details of a certain closed ‘party’ held at Madam Renado’s last night. You may turn him over to the British soldiers now,” the Commissioner instructed the guards. “Your wife will also be placed under arrest and will accompany you to London,” he added as Major Worthby was led from the room.

“And what is the charge against me?” Tanya wanted to know. “I have nothing to do with this S.M.U.T., or whatever it’s called. I’m only an innocent employee of Madam Renado’s. What do you want of me?”

“Quite simple.” It was Lagula who answered now. “You’ve been gathering information about S.M.U.T. for some time now. We’d simply like you to tell us what you’ve learned.”

“That’s ridiculous. I know nothing. I’m just a simple peasant girl gone wrong.”

“S.M.U.T. evidently has reason to think otherwise,” Lagula told her. “They’re onto you. According to Domino Diego, they’ve already compiled a complete dossier on you. They know you’re a Russian agent.”

“I deny everything! I demand to know the specific charges against me.”

“Illegal entry into the country,” the Commissioner told her. “At the least you’ll be deported. But we’d like to know the answers to some questions first. Think it over.” He motioned to the guards and Tanya too was led out.

“And that leaves me,” I observed. “Okay, Lagula, suppose you fill me in on what’s happened. What’s this about a deathbed confession of Domino’s? Is she really dead? Who killed her? What’s been going on?”

“I don’t mind answering your questions.” Lagula shrugged. “Perhaps by doing so I’ll convince you that you should answer mine. To start with, based on what Domino told us, it seems that Major Worthby’s spirited pursuit of us had a threefold motive. Firstly, he thought you were Steve Victor and was out to stop you before you could report back to Intelligence on the connection between S.M.U.T. and the brothel.”

“I am Steve Victor,” I said automatically and without any longer having much hope that I’d be believed.

“We needn’t debate that point any longer,” Lagula said. “Anyway, Worthby’s second motive was that he’d bought a quite innocent red herring you and I huckstered last night at the casino. He was convinced that I was some sort of high African mucky-muck who’d been making deals on the highest level with the British. He wanted to get his hands on me so that he could force me to tell him the nature of those deals.”

“He sure is gullible,” I observed.

“Quite.” Lagula allowed himself a small smile. “But it’s really his third motive which concerns us most. You see, Worthby had cause to be very frightened of the prospect of Domino’s falling into our hands. She knew too much. In addition to her other duties at the brothel, she was also Worthby’s mistress whenever he wanted her. She knew all about the S.M.U.T. operation because he’d told her. Sexually, she seems to have had great influence over him. Like many a man obsessed, he couldn’t resist bragging to her about his activities and what a big man he was going to be once S.M.U.T. took over. Yes, he told her a lot. Not just about the brothel, but about other S.M.U.T activities as well. The contraceptive- smuggling deal, for instance.”

“Just what was that deal?” I asked.

“I’ll get to that,” Lagula replied. “But first consider another important factor. Domino—and I’ll never understand why—actually fell in love with the Major. She began putting pressure on him to divorce his wife and marry her. When he balked, she made several veiled threats about revealing their affair to his wife. Probably she didn’t mean them. But from Worthby’s viewpoint, he was in a fix. You see, his wife was as involved in S.M.U.T. as he was. All Domino had to do was let drop a piece of info he’d fed her to his wife, and Mrs. Worthby would know he was Domino’s lover and that he’d blabbed to her. The Major knew his wife as a very jealous type. He knew that if she found out about him and Domino, she would tell some higher-up in S.M.U.T. and he’d be branded as a traitor. There was only one punishment for that—death. Then, when he got to the farmhouse tonight, went to the room where Domino was supposed to be torturing you, and realized that you’d escaped with her, he jumped to the conclusion that she’d defected. During the chase that followed, he gave orders to his men to kill her on sight.”

“But they didn’t,” I remembered.

“Right. Because she voluntarily surrendered to the Major himself. He intended to deal with her himself, afterwards. At least, so it seems. Anyway, he passed the word to his men that if it looked like she was going to be recaptured by us, they should kill her. Then, after I took her and the wounded Maltese prisoner, when we got to Valetta, that’s exactly what he tried to do. I hadn’t had time to search him, and he had a knife strapped to his leg. As we stepped from the car, he leaped or her and stabbed her. I shot him immediately, but it was too late. The wound was fatal, although it took two hours for Domino to die.”

“And during those two hours she did a lot of talking,” I surmised.

“Yes. She told us about the Major and what she knew about the S.M.U.T. operation. She said the Major said he was in charge in Malta, but she had a sneaking suspicion that he was bragging and that maybe the real one who ran things was his wife. She told us about the ‘private party’ at the brothel last night. Remember I told you we couldn’t go there because it was closed to the public for the evening?”

“I remember.”

“Well,” Lagula continued, “it was a very unusual affair. Not an orgy, or anything like that at all. The Major had arranged it with Madam Renado. He showed up at ten o’clock with two trucks. One was loaded with cartons of small, empty bottles. Each of these bottles was labeled. The labels identified them as containing birth-control pills. The second truck contained several large barrels of small pills. According to Domino, these were made of a perfectly harmless chalk substance. The ‘party’ consisted of the girls of the brothel sitting around and putting the useless pills into the labeled bottles. Domino said the Major told her the stuff had been smuggled in the night before, and that after leaving the brothel, it would be distributed throughout Malta.”

“With the same objective as the punctured contraceptives,” I mused.

“Yes. But with one diabolical difference. Each of the empty bottles, before being filled with the pills, was rinsed in a large vat of goats’ milk.”

“Malta Fever!” I snapped my fingers, making the connection.

“That’s our guess, too,” Lagula agreed. “As a matter of fact, according to Domino, the contraceptives were to be rinsed in goats’ milk too before being distributed.”

“Did she happen to mention how they recognized me so quickly?” I asked.

“The faulty identification they made,” Lagula told me pointedly, “stemmed from the fact that you were recognized by a S.M.U.T. agent when you left London. They’ve had a tail on you ever since you arrived in Malta. Of course they were surprised at how quickly you found your way straight to their headquarters.” His voice was heavy with sarcasm. “But then so was I,” he added, “until I realized that as a Russian agent you’d been tipped off by another Russian agent who’d infiltrated S.M.U.T.”

“You mean Tanya? But I—-”

“Save it, Comrade. Domino told us all about Tanya before she died. S.M.U.T. was onto her. Once I learned that, it wasn’t hard to figure just how you fitted in.”

“But you’ve got it all wrong. Look, if you won't take my word for it, then check with Charles Putnam.”

“Charles Putnam? There is no Charles Putnam,” Lagula said levelly.

“Okay! Whatever he’s calling himself this week, then. He can identify me.”

“A gentleman from London is on his way here to make an identification,” Lagula informed me. “He should be here in about two hours. While we’re waiting for him, why don’t you be a good fellow and tell us just how much the Russians have learned about S.M.U.T.? You must realize that they’ve branded you a traitor by now. If you try to go back to them, they’ll kill you. Why not cooperate with us?” my little friend wheedled.

“Because I’m not a Russian. I’m Steve Victor. I just said that to . . .”

And so it went for the next two hours. Lagula kept digging for information I didn’t have, and I kept trying to convince him that I really was who I really am. We were still stalemated when the Commissioner finally led Charles Putnam into the room.

“Will you please tell these idiots who I am,” I demanded. “Tell them I’m Steve Victor!”

“Certainly I’ll identify you,” Putnam agreed. “Gentlemen, it has been established that Steve Victor is in Manila,” he told them. “This man is an impostor, a Russian agent named Boris Karenkov! ”

chapter five

“YOU ARE going to take a long sea voyage,” the Gypsy fortune-teller promised me.

“For my health?” I asked.

“No.” She looked deeper into the crystal ball. “No, I would not say that it will improve your health. On the contrary, it may involve grave hazards to your well-being .”

“Then why should I go?”

“You have no choice. The Fates have decreed it.”

She had me there. The Fates—or the powers-that-be, if you prefer -- had me by the short and groiny follicles. I had no choice but to follow their grip; it was just as tight a hold now as it had been back in the office of the Valetta Commissioner of Police when Putnam had pulled the rug out from under me.

“This man is not Steve Victor; he is an impostor, a Russian agent,” friend Putnam had announced in that potato-grater voice of his.

“Putnam! What are you saying?” I’d squealed. “This is no time to play games. You know I’m Steve Victor.”

“A very convincing impersonator,” Putnam observed.

“Stop being ridiculous! I can prove to you that I’m Steve Victor. London, Putnam. Our little playmate Gladys. The way you contacted me by leaving a note sticking out of her derriere. There, doesn't that prove it?”

“And very imaginative, as you can see,” Putnam told Lagula and the Commissioner.

“We first met in Damascus,” I reminded him desperately. “Our next meeting was in Tokyo. Then twice in London.”

“And very well briefed,” Putnam added. “He fooled us thoroughly in London. It's a good thing you uncovered the deception when you did,” he complimented Lagula. “I don’t think he’s had a chance to get any information to the Russians yet.” Putnam turned to the Commissioner. “I’ve arranged for the British to take charge of the prisoner,” he told him. “I trust that meets with your approval.”

The Commissioner shrugged. “It is no concern of mine. I am always happy to cooperate with the British. Will they also have custody of Madam Renado?”

“Yes.” Lagula answered him.

“Then she will not be free to resume her — ahh-business activities?”

“I’m afraid not,” Lagula said.

“A pity.” The Commissioner sighed. “It will deplete my income sadly.”

“I’m sure you’ll be able to make other financial arrangements with some other enterprising lady,” Putnam assured him.

“I suppose so.” From the look on the Commissioner's face, his mind was already going over the possibilities. Well, a policeman’s lot is not an easy one. The salary is very small and must be augmented, I suppose.

I didn’t waste much time worrying about his problem. My own predicament was more pressing. It weighed heavily on me—-to say the least -- as two husky British soldiers followed Putnam’s instructions and hustled me off for an inside tour of the famous Valetta fortifications. The tour ended in a dungeon lapped by the sea water which surrounds three sides of Fort St. Elmo.

It sure looked like I was down for the count a la Monte Cristo. This dungeon was at the base of the fort, and when I chinned myself up to the one window, I saw that the level of the ocean was only about a foot below the barred aperture. It was pretty dank as it stood, but I couldn’t help wondering what happened when the morning tide came in. Luckily, I never had to find out.

About two hours after the dungeon door had clanged shut behind me, I was pulled out of a semi-sleep by the noise of something being drawn across the window bars. Looking up, I was able to make out an oar hitting against them in the moonlight. I pulled myself up to the window bars and found myself looking into a rowboat moored alongside the window.

Two men in the rowboat were very busy setting up a hacksaw blade on the end of one of the oars, evidently intending to saw away the window bars. The third man was sitting there with the attitude of a paying passenger above such menial labor. The third man was Charles Putnam.

“Haven’t we met someplace before?” I greeted him.

“I do seem to recollect that we have.”

“Now you recollect? Your memory’s improved. How come?”

“Everything will be explained to you in due time, Mr. Victor.”

“The name is familiar,” I told him. “But are you sure it's mine?”

“I never forget a name-—-or a face,” he assured me.

“Never?”

“No, never.”

“Never?”

“Well, hardly ever.”

I figured that was enough Gilbert and Sullivan under the circumstances, and so I lapsed into silence. The two men with Putnam knew their business. It took them less than an hour to saw off the bars of my prison. I climbed into the rowboat alongside Putnam, and they rowed us silently away from the fortifications.

I took my cue from Putnam and kept quiet. Rags had been wrapped around the oars to muffle the sounds of rowing. We glided silently past both Maltese and British guard-ships. Finally, we were out of the harbor itself. We anchored next to a pretty spiffy-looking private yacht. A ladder was dropped to us, and we climbed aboard. I followed Putnam down to a luxurious cabin.

When we were alone, I finally allowed myself to explode. “Now what’s the big idea?” I asked indignantly. “Why did you deny I was Steve Victor? Why did you have the British throw me into a dungeon if you meant to rescue me? What the hell is going on?”

“My apologies, Mr. Victor. It was necessary. Believe me. It is to our advantage to pretend that you are an impostor and that the man impersonating you in Manila is the real Steve Victor. We aren’t sure that the Commissioner can be trusted. It’s possible that he would sell information to anyone for a price. The Russians-S.M.U.T. -— anyone. Also, with Major Worthby involved in S.M.U.T., we can’t be sure if he’s dragged any of his fellow officers in with him. So, under the circumstances, it seemed best to make a point of imprisoning you and then arranging your escape.”

“But they’ll know that I’ve escaped.”

“Yes. But the assumption will he that you’re a Russian agent. They may even decide to leak information to the Russians proving that you’ve defected. That way they’ll figure the Russians themselves will take care of you. We may even have a corpse fished up out of the bay so they’ll think that’s exactly what happened to you. Then they’ll dismiss you from their minds and concentrate on worrying about the man they think is the real Steve Victor in Manila.”

“But why should someone in Manila be impersonating me?!’

“We don’t know that, Mr. Victor. But we do know he killed a S.M.U.T. agent there and that you’re wanted there for murder.”

“Remind me to stay away from Manila.”

“That would be wise. But let me continue. We don’t have much time. As things stand now, we only have one lead to S.M.U.T. in Malta—-Mrs. Dwight Worthby."

“The Major’s wife? I thought she’d been arrested.”

“We arranged to have her tipped off, and she evaded the police. We wanted her to go free. She’s the only one who might lead us to the higher-ups in S.M.U.T. She’s really been the brains in Malta. Her husband was only a front man.”

“Then Domino was right.”

“Yes. Now, Mrs. Worthby is in hiding, but we have her under surveillance. Indications are that she’s making arrangements to get out of Malta. We want you to follow her. No matter where she leads you, we want you to stick with her. We’re hoping she’ll take you somewhere near the top man in S.M.U.T.”

“But I met the lady once,” I remembered. “In the casino. Won’t she recognize me?”

“Lagula told me of that meeting. It was brief. And I’ve made arrangements for you to have a disguise. You’re going to be fixed up immediately.” Putnam pulled a bell-cord hanging beside the porthole.

“But why me?” I asked. “Why don’t you have one of your regular agents tail her? ”

“Alas, none of our regular agents has a way with women comparable to yours, Mr. Victor.”

“Huh?”

“It's true. You see, we don’t want you just to follow Mrs. Worthby. We want you to get to know her and to worm your way into her confidence if possible.”

“What do you mean by ‘worm my way’?”

“I shall leave that up to you, Mr. Victor. I have implicit faith in your ability.”

“Thanks a whole heap. Have you seen Mrs. Worthby? She's not exactly my type, you know.”

“Sometimes one’s country must call on one for sacrifices above and beyond the call of duty.”

“What makes you think she’s so inclined? After all, she is a married woman.”

“Our information is that that has never stopped her in the past. Mrs. Worthby, it seems, has a penchant for illicit affairs with men that amounts to an obsession. If Major Worthby had a horn for every time he’d been cuckolded, his forehead would look like a trophy room.”

“And you don’t think she’ll remember me? ’

“Not when we get through with you. Ahh, here is Andre now.” Putnam greeted an effeminate young man wearing the white coat of a beauty-parlor operator.

I smelled Andre even before he came through the door to the cabin. It was the aroma of a flower garden which had gone far too far. His appearance fit in with it. His hair was thick, black, curly, and coiffed into a Medusa-like complexity. His moustache was waxed, pointed at the ends, and shaped into a permanent sneer. His eyes were soft as a doe’s, and his hands fluttered like butterfly wings as he surveyed me.

“Irish,” Putnam told him. “Red hair, red beard, uptilted nose, rosy cheeks-—the works.”

Andre went to work. His hands proved stronger than they looked, and only slightly, slyly caressing as they moved over my head and face. Hair dye flowed, covering roots and all; putty was molded into my nostrils, turning up the tip of my nose; more putty raised my cheekbones and widened and angled my forehead. Even my ears were forced outward, away from the side of my head, and the lobes made pointy. Then came the beard and moustache, created on the base foundation he’d made of my face.

“Dimples?” he asked Putnam, standing back to survey his handiwork.

“Perhaps one.”

“No! ” I drew the line. “Absolutely not!”

“Oh, very well.” Andre actually sighed. “But it would do wonders for your facial personality.” He stood back and studied me. “I think I’m finished,” he announced with—honest to Elizabeth Arden—a dramatic flourish. “Yes, it is done.” He handed me a mirror.

Macushla! The face looking back at me out-Irished Paddy’s pig. Saints be preserved! It was carved right out of the Blarney Stone. Up the Irish! It was a ruddy slab of the Auld Sod from County Cork itself.

But it was more than merely Irish. It was Irish with character. The bushy red hair was a flaming banner flung in the face of the Black and Tans. The red beard, equally aflame, was worthy of a Killarney highwayman thumbing his nose at the British landowner whose coach he’d just robbed. So help me, my pearly white teeth actually flashed when I grinned behind the beard. All in all, I looked like the archtype of the Irish renegade.

“Sure now, an’ ’tis a sight to behold,” I brogued aloud.

“Excellent, Mr. Victor,” Putnam approved. “A lilt of an Irish accent will be fine. Only don’t overdo it. Now, remember this. Your name is Liam O’Ryan. You are a writer by profession, and you come from Dublin. You're on the run from the British. Perhaps you killed someone, but you won’t talk about it. You hate the British and the Americans, too, because you feel that they’ve financed the British and enabled them to maintain partition. But you have no use for the Commies, either. In short, you're a perfect possibility as a recruit for S.M.U.T. You’ll be provided with papers to bear out your story. Also, arrangements will be made so that your story will check out back in Dublin if inquiries are made. Now, in a few minutes you will be rowed ashore. A car will be waiting. It will take you back to Valetta. You will be dropped off at a Gypsy tearoom. Go into the back and ask to have your fortune told. Your appearance will identify you. The woman who tells your fortune will be your only contact with us. She will inform you of Mrs. Worthby’s movements. You shouldn’t have to contact her more than once. Good luck, Mr. Victor.”

“Just a moment!” Andre had been silently standing by all this time, and now he clapped his hands and jumped excitedly. “I have it. Just the touch. Do not move, sir.” He rummaged around in his large case of beauty aids. “Here!” He came up with a black eye-patch with an elastic band attached to it. Before I knew what he was up to, he'd fastened it over my left eye. “Voila!” He stood back and stared at me, his face transfixed with an expression of fulfilled inspiration.

“Now what the hell do I need that for?” I asked Putnam.

“I never interfere with genius,” he told me. “If Andre feels it’s necessary to complete the picture, then I must uphold him. If I didn’t, he might defect to the Russians or the Chinese. He’s had offers, and he’s very temperamental. I don't know how we'd ever get along without him. Such artists must be treasured.”

“Thank you, Mr. Putnam.” Andre beamed. “Don’t worry,” he assured me with an intimate pat on the behind, “you will soon grow accustomed to it.”

So I one-eyed myself over the side of the ship to the waiting dinghy. An hour later the car dropped me off in front of the Gypsy tearoom in Valetta. And now here I was being told that the Fates had a sea voyage in store for me.

“The lady has made arrangements to sail on the Luzona Maru leaving Valetta at six o’clock tomorrow morning,” the fortune-teller told me now. “Passage has been arranged for you. Your papers will be ready in a few moments."

There was a sudden flash of light, and I blinked my uncovered eye. “What was that?” I asked with a start.

“Your picture has just been taken,” the Gypsy told me. “For a passport photo.”

“That's one I’ll put in my scrapbook,” I promised. “Incidentally, just where is the Luzona Maru bound for?”

“Manila. ’

Putnam must have planned it! That was all I could think. The one place on the face of the earth where they were after my hide for murder. Still, I suppose it figured. Maybe I’d finally come face to face with my homicidal double. I wondered if the Philippine cops would penetrate my disguise. “I sure hope the Manila police suffer from astigmatism,” I said aloud .

“I beg the gentleman’s pardon?” the Gypsy said.

“Never mind. Just a private prayer.”

A man slid into the room, handed some papers to the Gypsy, and slid out again. She examined them before passing them to me. “Passport. Money. Letters from Dublin. Yes, everything is here,” she said, checking them off.

I put the papers in my pocket, thanked her, and left. I found an all-night movie and dozed in a rear seat until about five-thirty. Then I made my way to the docks and boarded the Luzona Maru.

It was a tramp steamer sailing under a Portuguese flag. From the looks of her, she didn’t carry passengers as a rule. I’ve seen garbage scows on the Hudson that looked less filthy and beat-up. I guessed that she probably hadn't had a paint job since before Dewey sailed past her in Manila Bay.

A dried-up Peter Lorre of a steward showed me to my cabin. It was small, which I’d expected. What I hadn’t expected was the smell of deep fat frying which I’d later learn was to be ever-present. It seemed I’d been put right next to the galley and my room shared the same ventilating system—or lack of it—-with the garbage disposal unit. I held my nose and tried to grab a few hours’ sleep.

Despite the odors, I slept right through breakfast until lunchtime. I might have gone right on sleeping if the steward hadn’t slithered into my cabin and wakened me. He was full of oily concern over the possibility of my missing lunch as well as breakfast, but I suspected that his real motive was to get me out of bed so he could make up the cabin and be finished with his work. Anyway, I got dressed and went up to lunch.

I rated the Captain’s table. Aboard the Luzona Maru that was something less than shipboard elegance. There were four at table, the Captain, the First Mate, myself, and a lady who was introduced as Mrs. Wheatley. Between slurps of soup, the Captain informed me that the only passengers on board were myself and Mrs. Wheatley.

I recognized Mrs. Wheatley immediately as Major Dwight Worthby’s wife. As far as I could tell, she didn’t penetrate my disguise. But then maybe she was more concerned with herself, since she was also somewhat camouflaged.

When I’d met her the first time, in the casino, Mrs. Worthby-Wheatley had looked a typical upper-crust British officer’s wife. Her figure had been slender, but the off-the-shoulder evening gown she’d been wearing had seemed designed more to accentuate bone structure than flesh. Ruffles over the bosom had left its size and shape to guesswork. She’d seemed sharp-featured and bird-eyed, with a metallic cast to her blonde hair. All in all, a thirtyish British sophisticate with her delicate nose riding high in the clouds, the lady had hardly been the picture of pulchritude or sex appeal.

Sad to say, she was even less so now. She may have seemed asexual, but at least she’d looked smartly turned out back in the casino. Now she was even more asexual — and positively dowdy besides. Her blonde hair seemed duller, and it was cropped to lie flat along the sides of her head. Rimless glasses pinched her nose and made her blue eyes seem larger and more watery. Her chest was completely flat now under a shapeless tweed jacket. Her skirt, also tweed, concealed her legs. And even her ankles were lost in the sensible walking shoes she wore. I upped my estimate of her age from thirtyish to late thirtyish — or even fortyish.

She acknowledged the Captain’s introduction with a bobbing motion of her head. It was the movement of a stork bobbing for apples, or a music teacher yo-yo-ing along with a metronome. She had a nice, firm, white, columnar neck, but the movement made it seem angular and awkward. If it had been up to me, I think I’d rather have devoted my attention to the steward.

Still, duty dictated—-and it wasn’t as if she was downright ugly. So, after lunch, I wandered down the deck until I found her stretched out under a light blanket in a deck chair and asked her if she minded if I sat in the chair beside her. A reluctant and precise agreement forced its way from between her lips, and I settled on the chaise longue.

“Is it pleasure takes you to Manila now?” I opened the conversation with my best impersonation of Barry Fitzgerald.

“My sister lives there. I’m going there to live with her and her husband.”

“Your husband is there then already, is he?”

“No. My husband is dead. I’m a widow.”

“Sure an’ I’m apologizin’ to you, then.”

“It’s not necessary. My husband died a long time ago.”

“Oh?” I decided to become a bit more wolfishly Irish. “Then it’s a merry widow you are.”

“No,” she told me firmly and humorlessly. “I’m not merry at all, Mr. O’Ryan.”

“Call me Liam. We’ve a long journey before us. ’Tis right well we’ll be gettin’ to know each other. So let’s be startin’ out friends. An’ what would your Christian name be?”

“Mavis.” She still sounded reluctant.

“Well now, Mavis, if you’ll be sittin’ up a little and lookin’ starboard, I’ll point out one of the sights of the world to you.”

She sat up and looked where I was pointing. “Oh!” she gasped. “It is beautiful. What is it?”

“The Isle of Crete,” I told her. “An’ the purple o’ the hills you’re seein’ is doubtless the Greek blood spilled by British bayonets on the blessed soil.”

“That’s olive trees and some sort of heather,” Mavis said practically.

“Tis the poet in me,” I said, grinning at her. I stretched, looked up at the sun, took off my shirt and stretched again. I let her get a good look at my muscles rippling in the sunlight before I pointed my satyr-like red beard in her direction again. “Sure an’ this Mediterranean sun’ll bring the blush to your cheeks, Mavis,” I told her. “But you’ll never be tannin’ with all those clothes you’ve on.”

“I don’t tan. I burn. I get a very bad sunburn.”

“I’m thinkin’ it’s just that you’re shy an’ inhibited,” I told her boldly.

“I suppose I am.” Her voice was still cold, but her eyes were glued to my pectorals and there were signs of smouldering in their watery depths.

I sat back down beside her and stretched out. “Course it is a mite cool when you lie still,” I observed. “Do you think I might be sharin’ your blanket with you?”

“Of course.” She reached over to spread the blanket and her hand grazed over my bare chest.

I took hold of it. “Yes, it is chilly," I said again. “Sure an’ your hand’s like an icicle. Let me be warmin’ it for you.” I put it on my chest and covered it with my own hand.

“I don’t think-—-” she started to say. But she cut the words off when I squeezed her hand, and instead of finishing the sentence, she squeezed back.

After that, things picked up. There were developments. And the developments were interesting. Very interesting. Not that anybody would have guessed from the conversation which continued between us.

“Why are you going to Manila, Mr.—Liam?”

“’Tis a writer I am by profession. I’m after some background material.”

“I should think there would be enough of that in Ireland.”

“An’ right as rain you’d be. But I had a bit o’ trouble in Erin with the British landowners. You might say I was asked to leave the country—after a fashion.”

“You don’t sound as if you like the British very much.”

“Well, not the men.” I shot her a lecherous grin. “But I’m right partial to the ladies.”

“If that was meant as a compliment, then thank you.”

“It was indeed. An’ well-deserved.”

At this point the steward paddy-footed up the deck. “Sir, Mrs.,” he said, “Captain says tell you dinner in one hour. You dress, I laid out clothes already. Should go now if you wish shower. Half-hour, we cut water pressure for more steam. You go now, yes? ”

“Yes.” Mavis answered got both of us. “Not this moment, but soon. That will be all.” She dismissed the man haughtily.

Mavis had a reason for not getting up right away. Her hand had slid down my chest while we were talking. It had slid under my belt, well down into my pants. It had shoved my underwear aside and grasped the object of its quest firmly. And it had been manipulating it rhythmically all the time we were conversing.

Nor had she lost so much as one stroke when the steward interrupted us. Cool as ice, she had continued the rotary rubbing while she answered and dismissed him. And she showed no signs of relinquishing her hold or the rhythm after he had gone. She kept right on talking and right on caressing. It was as if her hand had nothing to do with the rest of her. It was as if the mind which produced the words she was speaking had nothing to do with the actions of that hand.

“Regardless of your opinion of the British,” she was saying, her hand moving like a piston and with lightning speed now, “I’ve always had great admiration for the Irish.”

“Erin go bragh!" I replied, shouting. “Erin go bragh!" And I lunged so violently with my release that I fell off the deck chair. “Erin go bragh! ”

chapter six

IN A WAY, that first afternoon set the pattern for the relationship—if you can call it that -- between Mavis and myself. The trip from Malta to Manila took twenty-one days. During those three weeks, we engaged in constant erotic activity. But never once did Mavis consciously acknowledge what we were doing.

It was weird. At dinner that first night, for instance, she picked right up where we’d left off on deck. Under cover of the tablecloth, she pulled one of my hands into her lap. She’d worked her rough tweed skirt up over her thighs, and the flesh of her upper legs was burning as they locked my hand just where she wanted it. She wasn’t wearing any panties. Her hand on top of mine moved the fingers until she’d established the rhythm she wanted. Then she left it there, took her own hand out from under the table, and reached for the butter.

“Will you pass the bread, please?” she asked the Captain in that precise, dry, schoolteacher-ish voice of hers.

“Of course.” Both he and the Mate were completely unaware of how I was providing Mavis with her kicks.

“Have you ever been through the Suez Canal, Mr. O’Ryan?” the mate asked me.

“Yes. But it was many years ago.” I was nowhere near being able to carry it off with as much detachment as Mavis. My voice was a little raspy, and I tensed up so that I stopped moving my hand against her as I spoke. Indeed, I almost forgot my Irish accent altogether.

The pause irritated Mavis. She wriggled impatiently until I resumed the rhythmic pressure. Then, still cucumber-calm, she joined in the conversation. “I’ve never seen Suez,” she said.

“Then you should make a point of being on deck to-morrow toward dusk,” the Captain told her. “The approach to the Canal is one of the sights of the world. We’ll anchor outside the locks and go through first thing in the morning-—just as soon as the Egyptian authorities clear us.”

“I certainly shall make a point of being on deck when we come within sight of Suez, then,” Mavis assured him. She had contrived to raise herself slightly off her chair and was surreptitiously rotating against my stroking fingers. “I’m so sorry I don’t have a camera. I would like to take some snapshots of it. Do you have a camera, Mr. O’Ryan?”

“Tis sorry I am, but no, I don’t.” I didn’t miss a stroke that time. I was getting the hang of the game.

“Is the meat to your satisfaction, Mrs. Wheatley?” the Captain asked.

“It could use a little more seasoning. Otherwise it’s” -she paused delicately-“satisfactory. She punctuated her choice of a word by clamping my hand firmly in place. Even under the tweed jacket I could see her breasts inflate as she caught her breath. A moment later her whole body shuddered visibly and her knuckles were white as she grasped the edge of the table.

“Are you all right, Mrs. Wheatley?” the Captain asked, staring at her as her face flushed a bright red.

The flush receded almost immediately. “I’m quite all right, thank you, Captain,” she said with perfect control and equanimity. “A sudden chill, that’s all. I’m not used to the sea air, I suppose.”

My hand was slippery with the results of that “sudden chill,” and I started to remove it. Mavis tightened her thigh muscles instantly and shot me a quick but insistent glance from the corner of her eyes. She started moving again, and I realized she was demanding an encore.

I went along with the demand. And she went right on with the conversation through dessert and coffee. Her second “sudden chill” became evident as she drained the last of her java. “I’ll leave you gentlemen to your brandy now,” she said primly when it was over. “No, please don’t get up.”

I was the only one who'd started to rise, but once she’d said it, the Captain and Mate both picked up the cue and got to their feet as she left. By that time I’d changed my mind about being courteous, though. I was trying to surreptitiously wipe my hand on the tablecloth, and this necessity made me decide to stay glued to my seat. Mavis shot me a very disapproving, upper-class English look as she went out.

But I didn’t let the look discourage me. I waited a decent interval after dinner and then went straight to her cabin. I knocked on the door, and when there was no immediate answer, I tried the knob. It was locked. I knocked again. This time Mavis responded.

“Yes? Who is it?” she called.

“Liam. I thought you might be enjoyin’ a nightcap with me afore we turn in.”

“I’m sorry, but I’ve already undressed for bed.” Her voice was icy. The tone said I was taking too much for granted.

I refused to be discouraged. “Sure an’ I could bring the spirits here,” I told her.

“No, thank you. I’m very tired. I really would like to go to sleep.”

“All right, lass. Some other time, then.” I turned away, feeling like a rejected suitor. It seemed the kookie lady had no intention of following through in the hay. I wondered if she had any intention of following through at all.

The next afternoon I was relieved on that score -- relieved in a way, that is—in Mavis’s own peculiar way. I’d been up on deck throughout most of the afternoon, but she hadn’t come out of her cabin. I was in my swimming trunks soaking up some of that incomparable Mediterranean sunshine when I spotted the hazy outline of Suez approaching over the horizon. I decided it might provide an opening for re-establishing rapport, and so I went down to Mavis’s cabin and knocked on the door. “We’re comin’ in sight of Suez,” I told her. “I thought you might be wantin’ to see it as we approach.”

“Thank you, Liam. That’s very considerate of you.” There was a pause, and then she opened the door. “I was just about to take a shower and dress,” she said, eyeing my bare chest with a hint of appreciation. “Would you like to come in and wait? I'll only be a few moments.”

“That I would.” I was returning her look, and much more boldly. Mavis was more feminine than I'd ever seen her before. Her blonde hair was fluffed out, and she was wearing one of those white terrycloth robes that reached to just above her knees. She was barefoot, and I judged that she wasn’t wearing anything underneath it. Her figure still looked slender, but it seemed more voluptuous now with the robe hugging it so that the curve of hips and bosom was accentuated. Once again I revised my estimate of her age, this time downward, guessing it at somewhere in the mid- or late twenties.

“Make yourself comfortable.” She flicked the latch on the stateroom door as she closed it behind us. “I’ll just have a quick shower.” She went into the bathroom and left the door ajar about a third of the way. “There’s some Scotch on the dresser,” she called over her shoulder. “Help yourself to a drink.”

“Thanks. That I will.” I turned to the dresser and found myself looking into a large mirror with my one uncovered ye. The angle of the mirror gave me a clear view into the bathroom. My first glance was just in time to see Mavis, her back to me, drop the terrycloth robe to the tiled floor and step into the tub. From the rear she was all sleek ivory. She didn’t seem bony to me any more, merely slender. And her derriere was surprisingly high and plump and well-shaped. I fumbled with the Scotch on the bureau and kept right on staring into the mirror.

There was lots to stare at. Mavis hadn’t bothered drawing the shower curtain as she stepped into the tub. Now, as she turned on the faucet and adjusted it, she was standing so that her image in the mirror was facing me head-on.

Where had I ever gotten the idea that she was angular? Or spindly? Or flat-chested? Wherever I’d gotten the idea, I knew now how wrong it was. Mavis’s breasts, now that they were free of the flattening tweeds she wore, were round as basketballs, not as big, to be sure, but large enough to fill half a hoop anyway. She was slim-hipped, but there was still a demure and balanced jutting from under her tiny waist, and slender as her hips were, they were well-padded with flesh rather than bony. Her legs were long and tapered and thoroughbred English. And, I couldn’t help noticing, she was a natural blonde.

Now, as I continued staring in the mirror, she lathered the proof of her blondeness. Then she leaned back against the wall, her shoulderblades against it, her breasts thrusting upward, her feet wide apart, and her eyes met mine in the mirror and deliberately prolonged the contact. Her hands moved over her bosom as she soaped it. Then she put the soap aside and massaged the lather into her breasts with her hands. She palmed the tips and squeezed them as the water cascaded down in front of her face and washed over her bosom. As her hands slid farther down to her flat belly, the last of the suds was rinsed from the breasts and their tips stood out like twin bright-tingling red spear-points. Still holding my eyes with hers, she arched even more and began laving the soapsuds from the blonde triangle with her hand.

Mavis was very thorough, very hygienic. Proving this was the systematic way she soaped up two fingers and used them strenuously. Only then did her glance drop so that she was no longer looking into my eyes. It slid lingeringly over my chest to my bathing trunks and stayed riveted there. Her tongue peeped out between her lips as she concentrated on the fast-enlarging and straining tell- tale bulge.

That did it! I forgot all about the Scotch. I turned around and took one long step toward the half-opened bathroom door. I’d just reached it when she stopped me.

“No!” she exclaimed. “Don’t come any closer. Just stand there.”

I did as she asked, and her gaze returned to my trunks. Her hand moved faster and faster.

“Let me see it,” she moaned after a moment. “I want to see it.”

I slid my hands down my hips and slid the trunks off. They tumbled to my ankles in a heap. My manhood leaped free and crossed the invisible line she’d drawn at the bathroom doorway.

“Ahh,” she sighed, her eyes no longer watery, but very bright and glittering now. “The Irish really are a mighty race of men.”

She fell silent then. I was quivering like an arrow, but I made no move toward her. If this was the way she wanted it, my aim was to please. Finally a high-pitched laugh burst from her lips, and her hand seemed to disappear from view. Her eyes shut for a long moment, and when she finally relaxed, she almost lost her balance and fell.

I started for her then, but again she stopped me. “I’m all right, Liam,” she said in that same old even, unemotional tone of voice. “Why don’t you have that drink now while I get dried off and dress?”

“I’m needin’ somethin’ right enough,” I told her, “but I’m not sure it’s a drink.”

“Help yourself,” she answered meaningfully. “To whatever it is you want. A drink, or—” She left the sentence unfinished and closed the door in my face.

Her suggestion not being my way, I settled for the drink. By the time I finished it, she emerged from the bathroom, fully dressed. The tweeds, the slicked-down hair, and the rimless glasses again; it was decidely no improvement.

“Pull up your bathing suit,” she said briskly, “and let’s go look at Suez.”

I pulled up my bathing suit, and I went and looked at Suez. An impressive view, but not as impressive as the one in the mirror a short time before. I had the frustrated gut-ache of a high-school boy left hanging in his girl-friend’s hallway after an incomplete necking session. Silently, I cursed Mavis for a selfish bitch.

I was still cursing her the following evening as we passed through the Suez locks. Traffic had been heavy, and we’d had to wait before being allowed to enter the canal. We were about halfway through now, and it was very dark, a moonless, starless night. The Captain had invited me up to the bridge to meet the Egyptian pilot who would take the helm for the Canal crossing. I’d stayed on the deck just outside the wheelhouse to watch the lock mechanisms being operated as we were raised and lowered from one level to the next. The Captain was standing at the door to the wheelhouse, talking to the pilot and me by turn. The Mate was farther up the wheel-house deck, keeping an eye on the prow of the ship. I was leaning on the railing just over the stairway leading down to the deck below. The Captain had just asked me if I was able to see much in the darkness when it happened.

“Not a helluva-—” I’d started to reply.

What stopped me was a sudden sly and very light touch on the zipper of my pants. Slow y and cautiously, the zipper was pulled open. A hand fumbled over my jockey shorts.

“I beg your pardon, Mr. O’Ryan?” the Captain said. “I didn’t quite hear you.”

“I’m havin’ no trouble seein’,” I assured him.

Sharp fingernails scraped across the tender surface of my skin as the shorts were pushed aside. I winced at the touch.

“Is anything wrong, Mr. O’Ryan?”

“Nope. Everything’s just ginger-peachy. . . . Sure an’ it is,” I added as a hasty Irish afterthought.

My manhood was waving in the sea breeze now. A fist encircled it and moved energetically. A moment later the fist was replaced by warm lips, and I groaned gratefull .

“Perhaps you’d best go below, Mr. O’Ryan,” the Captain suggested, his tone concerned.

“Tis right as rain I am. Don’t be concernin’ yourself, Skipper,” I assured him. I had the rail by both hands now and I was arching like Elvis-the-pelvis toward the pitch-black stairway. I closed my eyes and saw stars as the eager tongue soothed the tenderness engendered by the previous day’s frustration.

Then I was engulfed all the way, and my head spun with the pressure of the hungry lips and the sudden, anticipatory contraction of the throat. I lunged forward and exploded. “WOW!” I yelled loudly, covering the sputtering, choking sounds below.

“What is it, Mr. O’Ryan?” The Captain was alarmed at my outburst.

“Over there.” I thought fast and pointed into the darkness. “Did you ever see anythin’ like it now?”

“Like what? ”

“Too late. It’s gone.” My manhood was being tucked neatly back into my shorts now. The zipper was pulled up silently, there was one final pat, and then it was over.

“What’s gone?” the Captain wanted to know.

“Indescribable it was,” I told him. “Too bad you missed it. Well, I think I’d best be turnin’ in now. Good night to you, Skipper. Good night, Matey.”

“Good night,” the Skipper answered.

But the Mate didn’t reply. I glanced over at him. His belly was pressed against the rail in the shadows. His eyes were bright and staring straight ahead. He was breathing quite heavily. I wondered . . .

In retrospect, I also wondered about something else. Was it really Mavis? I couldn’t be sure. I tried to put it out of my mind, but despite myself, I found myself staring at the hands of the members of the crew and looking for long fingernails. The longest of all seemed to be on the hands o the slimy, pudgy steward. I suppressed my rising gorge when I realized this, and then I did put it out of my mind. Some things you’re better off not knowing for sure.

In any case, the sneaky sex interlude would have been just like her. That’s what I thought to myself the following day when she came up on deck and returned my greeting in such a freeze-out manner that I began wondering if I was suffering from delusions about the things I should have been sure had happened between us. Mavis was all sexless tweedy again, and when I called her attention to the fact that we were well into the Red Sea, her only response was that the water looked brown, not red, to her. Then she stuck her nose in a book so pointedly that I almost felt called upon to sniff my armpits for signs of whatever it was my best friends wouldn’t tell me about.

The freeze stayed on until early in the morning of the day we started through the narrow Red Sea passage between Aden and French Somaliland. I was asleep in my cabin. It had been a hot night, and I’d left the porthole open. It was a high bunk and a low porthole. This had enabled Mavis, standing on the deck outside with her back to the porthole as she chatted with the steward, to reach behind her with her arm, lower her hand, and pull the blankets off me. Like a homing pigeon, her hand had reached into my pajamas and found its favorite roost. Of course, that’s only a guess, because I was sound asleep at the time.

I don’t remember what I was dreaming, but it must have been a lulu. I say that because the feelings in the dream carried over into wakefulness. And wakefulness sent me shooting almost straight up horizontally from my sack as I finally exploded under Mavis’s caress.

“So that's Aden over there,” she was saying to the steward. “My, isn't it picturesque?” Her fingers, having lost their prize, were wiggling at me now.

Obligingly, I wiped off her hand with the sheet. She removed her arm from the porthole then. I sat up and looked out of it.

“I think I’ll take a stroll around the deck,” Mavis told the steward.

I watched her move off, and then found myself looking straight into the steward’s face. “Will there be anything, sir?” he asked unctuously.

“No. Not a thing. I’m not needin’ a thing,” I told him. I settled back down on the bed and slowly woke up the rest of the way.

The next evening, as we sailed through the Gulf of Aden, the Captain had the crew put on an amateur show for us. It was pretty dreadful, but Mavis saw to it that I was in no mood to be too critical. She sat directly in front of me, the Captain beside her, the Mate alongside me. Our section of the deck was in the dark area beyond where the crew had set up a pair of spotlights for their makeshift stage. I think it was during the harmonica duet that Mavis made her move.

She moved her chair slightly backward, and then reached behind her until she found my hand. She guided it to the side part of the back of her chair and left it there a moment while she took off her tweed jacket and draped it over her shoulders. Then she reached around as though scratching her ribs or something and pulled my hand under her arm.

The blouse she was wearing was sleeveless. Her jacket covered my hand as it slid into the armhole. Her bra was very loose— purposely so, I guessed. There was plently of room for my hand to get under it and palm the nipple of her breast.

“They’re really quite good, aren’t they?” she whispered to the Captain.

“Yes, they are,” he agreed.

The act drew to a close, and the three of them applauded loudly. I didn’t clap. I was at a disadvantage, you see, one hand being tied up, so to speak. Instead, I squeezed Mavis’ naked breast enthusiastically. She responded by bouncing up and down in her seat as if carried away by the high caliber of the performance. I took it for granted it was my performance she was carried away by, though.

One spotlight was killed for the next performer, an off-key Neapolitan-style tenor who sobbed rather than sang his selection. I didn’t sob along with him, though. In the darkness, I was grinning from ear to ear as Mavis once again reached back and got her usual intimate grip on me.

We had our own rhythm going now, and it was double-time compared to the tenor. I squeezed, she squeezed, I squeezed, she squeezed, etc. . . . It didn’t take much with Mavis. No ultimate intimacy was necessary, if you know what I mean. She was a veritable patchwork quilt of erogenous zones, with that one breast I was fondling getting an A-rating for sensitivity. I squeezed, she squeezed, I squeezed, she squeezed. . . . The song ended. “Bravo!” We both shouted it together, with one voice, rising from our seats with our enthusiasm. Then, before the lights could come on, we hastily rearranged our clothing. And Mavis never blinked an eye in the face of conversation with the Captain and the Mate.

By now it should be obvious that Mavis was a girl who got her kicks out of performing sexually under the noses of others. I guess there was something about getting away with it without getting caught that she found particularly exciting. Nor did the excitement seem to pall on her throughout the rest of our journey.

After the Gulf of Aden, mealtimes in the Indian Ocean were even-Steven affairs with never more than three hands on the table between the two of us. The Captain and the Mate never seemed to catch wise—partly, I guess, because I was becoming more and more adept at concealing my sexual releases. Mavis, of course, had never had any problems that way. Still, I wondered what the steward though about the state of the tablecloths and any other evidences of our sly kanoodling.

The night we passed the tip of Ceylon headed toward the Straits of Malacca, Mavis was out on deck, stretched out on a chaise longue, a light blanket over her as she chatted with the Captain. He puffed on his pipe in the deck chair beside her, never dreaming that, concealed by her blanket, I was on my knees on the deck beside Mavis, my face buried just under the hem of her raised skirt. And she kept right on talking as she reached under the blanket with one hand, grabbed the back of my neck, and held my head rigid as spasm after spasm shook her body.

The next day we sailed the Straits of Malacca between Sumatra and Malaya. When the Mate called Mavis, she leaned out of her cabin porthole to see the Sumatran coastline. Seated out of sight on the bed behind her, I had both hands under her skirt and was squeezing the foam-rubber globes of her derriere as she ooh-ed and ahh-ed over the scenery the Mate was pointing out. Like her breasts this area proved highly reactive. She had three violent body-quakes while she passed the time of day with the Mate.

A few nights later we were well into the South China Sea. I was chatting with the Mate about the old-time Chinese pirates who used to prey on the trading ships which ventured into this area while Mavis, concealed by the shadows, was tickling my blanket-covered naked thighs with her blonde hair. She was out of sight under the blanket and getting a kick out of teasing me by removing her mouth every time I was on the verge of ending things. Finally I grabbed her by one ear and held her there until I was satisfied. Like the Captain, the Mate was completely unaware of what was happening.

Then came the night when we sailed within sight of Vietnam. In a few more days, we’d be docking at Manila. I decided it was time to really cement the relationship with Mavis. I went looking for her and found her coming out of the wireless shack.

“Are you sendin’ a wire ahead then?” I greeted her.

“Yes.” She looked a little flustered, which was out of character for her. “To my sister,” she added hastily, “asking her to meet me when we dock."

“Might I be seein’ you back to your cabin?” I asked, letting her odd reaction slide past. “To speak with you in private, if I may.”

“All right.”

When we entered the cabin, she left the door open behind us. I closed it pointedly. “Now then—” I began.

“You know, there’s been something different about you today, Liam,” she interrupted.

“Different? I don’t take your meanin’.”

“I’m not sure.” She held a finger up to her cheek and looked at me.

I had the feeling suddenly that she was sure, that she was playing with me, playing some sort of cat-and-mouse game. “Sure an’ there’s nothin’ different,” I told her.

“Yes, there is.” She snapped her fingers. Again I had the feeling that she was putting me on, that whatever it was she was pretending to have just noticed had really been noticed by her before. “That’s it! ” she exclaimed, but still not convincing me. “It’s your eye-patch. Up until today, you’ve always worn it over your left eye. But now you’ve got it over your right eye.”

Damn! I’d really goofed. My left eye had been bothering me from constantly being kept in the dark. I hadn’t consciously decided to switch the patch, of course. But I had put it on the wrong eye without thinking. It was a dead giveaway.

I couldn’t think of any excuse, so I decided to try to steer Mavis away from the topic as quickly as possible. “Never mind that,” I told her. “ ’Tis somethin’ else I’ve got on my mind. We’ve only a few days left, an’ I’ll not be put off any longer.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean. this hanky-panky is all very well, but there comes a time when a man wants his woman as he’s meant to have her. In bed! Between the sheets! Naked in his arms! With all o’ the organs fittin’ togither as they should.”

“Surely, you’re not suggesting—”

“Just as surely, that I am!” I pushed Mavis onto the bed and started removing her clothes. “Just once, without our bein’ sneaky about it an’ without an unknowin’ audience,” I told her. “I’m goin’ to be makin’ love to you that way this once -- an’ perhaps more! There’s been enough now o’ this damn foolishness!”

“You are not! ” Mavis Wriggled free, ran over to the door and flung it wide open. “Now you get out of here with your indecent proposals!” she yelled, her head held high, her face the very picture of outraged virtue. “Just what kind of a girl do you think I am?”

I was damned if I knew the answer to that one!

chapter seven

Ba-room!

Prim-pom-pum!

Ba-room! Ba-room!

“Heave to!” The megaphoned voice echoed through the night. “Heave to and prepare to be boarded!”

It was only a few minutes since Mavis had slammed the door behind me. I’d slunk down the corridor and out onto the deck. The night had been dark and quiet. We were too far from the Vietnam coast to hear the artillery or any other sounds of battle² . And our northeasterly course was taking us still farther from the trouble spot.

But not far enough! The sudden sound of naval cannon pegging shots well over our bow told me that. I heard the sound of the shells deliberately over-shooting us and then the voice before my eyes could make out anything in the darkness. It was only when the sound of our own engines ground to a halt that my eyes were able to pierce the blackness and make out the huge, ghostly shadow silently slipping through the sea until it was alongside us.

It was a U.S. destroyer. Huge and menacing, it towered over us. It was blacked-out and running silent as befit a warship patrolling a war zone. From the bridge hovering above us, the voice sounded again.

“Identify yourselves.”

“The freighter Luzona Maru out of Valetta and bound for Manila.” It was the Captain answering from our own bridge.

“What is your nationality? ”

“We fly the Portuguese flag.”

“Very well. We will board you now,” the voice from the ship announced.

“I protest! We are in international waters!” the Captain shouted back.

“Your protest has been duly noted. Prepare to receive a boarding party.”

Curious, I went up to the bridge and joined the Captain as two American naval officers and four sailors came aboard the Luzona Maru. The sailors remained on deck while the two officers came up to the wheelhouse. They saluted the Captain smartly.

“Our apologies for this intrusion, Captain,” the senior officer opened.

“It is your government which owes an apology to the Portugese government,” the Captain replied hotly. “This is inexcusable!”

“These are inexcusable times we live in, Captain,” the senior officer said smoothly. “We don’t wish any international incident over this. I hope you’ll try to understand. My government is engaged in some very bloody fighting in Vietnam. We owe it to our fighting men to maintain a naval blockade so that the enemy can’t be supplied.”

“I have nothing to do with all that,” the Captain insisted stiffly. “Vietnam is none of my concern. Manila is my destination. And I fly the flag of a noncombatant. Furthermore, this is an unpardonable infringement on the rights of a neutral nation. I shall see that Lisbon is informed immediately!”

“We would like to avoid trouble,” the senior officer told “If you cooperate, it will be simpler for all of us. And we won’t have to bother with filling out reports and exchanges of letters between our governments. I mean, Captain, let’s face it sensibly. What it boils down to is that Portugal will make a formal protest, my government will apologize, and in the end Portugal will accept the apology. But I am apologizing right now. Why don’t you accept my apology, an then it won’t have to go any further.”

The Captain considered it a moment. “Very well,” he decided. “If you leave my ship immediately.”

“I thought you had the look of a reasonable man, Captain. Now, I wonder if you mightn’t stretch that common sense a bit and allow my men to have a look at your cargo.”

“So that's it!” The Captain was angry. “The answer is absolutely not! ”

“And if I instruct my men to examine it anyway?”

“Then it will indeed become a matter between our governments.”

“So be it.” The naval officer sighed. “I had hoped I could persuade you to cooperate. But if you won’t, then there will simply have to be an international incident. I’m going to instruct my men to examine your cargo.”

“It will be more than a simple incident,” the Captain told him. He went into the wheelhouse and returned immediately. He had a pistol in his hand, and he pointed it at the chest of the American officer. “If you attempt to look at my cargo, if one of your men so much as makes a false start toward the hold, I shall instruct my crew to give battle. I will shoot you and your fellow officer where you stand, and I will issue orders to have your men tossed overboard."

“You can’t possibly think that you stand a chance against a destroyer,” the officer pointed out.

“No,” the Captain agreed. “But I wonder if they would dare sink me and risk an incident of that magnitude with Portugal. Indeed. I wonder if you dare to fight back on board my ship at all. Can you imagine the uproar if so much as one of my men were to die in such a fracas? Your government wouldn’t have a leg to stand on.”

'“You’re right. But look,” the officer pleaded, “won’t you reconsider and voluntarily let us examine your cargo?”

“No. And that’s final. Now, gentlemen, I must ask you to leave my ship immediately.”

“Very well.” The senior officer sighed. “You’re right. We can’t risk forcing you. But rest assured, Captain, that we shall escort you out of these waters.” He turned back as he reached the deck below. “But I wonder what it is, Captain,” he called, “that you’re taking such pains to conceal.”

I also wondered. Was the Captain merely standing on his rights, his dignity, maintaining face? Or did he really have something to conceal? I pondered the question as we picked up steam and resumed our course again. The destroyer steamed behind us like a mother hen prodding a baby chick out of the coop. The question went out of my mind as I realized that one shot from those forty-inchers would probably be enough to send us to the bottom. But the shot was never fired.

It was very late when I finally left the deck and went to my cabin. The flashlight beam hit me square between the eyes as I opened the door. The karate kick bounced off my tummy a split second later.

I fell away from it, out of the light-beam. A shadow hurtled past me on its way through the doorway. I reached out and got a grip on its ankle. It twisted as it fell and tried to bash my skull with the flashlight. Before it could succeed, I chopped at the wrist of the hand holding the light, and the flashlight went spinning across the room.

Two fingers were digging into each of my eyes now, seemingly trying to pry them from their sockets. I pried them loose, but it was a moment before I could see anything but blood and tears. No sweat. Except for that of my adversary, who was perspiring profusely.

It made him slippery—hard to hold. While I was still getting my vision back, he slid free of me and again tried for the door. I grabbed for the sound he made and came up with a handful of his rear end. It was hardly an ideal grip, but I held onto it anyway.

Abruptly, he stopped struggling and let his weight fall backward, full on top of me. I let out a grunt as he sat down hard on my belly. It was the part of my anatomy which seemed to be taking the most punishment in this fracas.

But my eyes, at least, had cleared by now. As I wrapped an arm around the intruder’s and wrenched so that he came crashing to the floor beside me, I was able to get a look at his face in the ray shining from the flashlight across the cabin. “Well, I’ll be damned!” I exclaimed as we continued struggling.

The face was right out of Warner Bros.’ heyday. It was the snake-face of Peter Lorre hissing at Bogie³ . It was the round and whiney visage of old Sneaky Pete⁴ himself testifying that the days of really expert villainy were far from over. It was Mr. Moto⁵ himself , all decked out in a ship steward’s uniform. It was Zombie Petey risen from the grave and pretending to be a steward on this old Portugee bucket, but really up to his old nefarious tricks of rifling the hero’s stateroom again.

As a kid I’d hissed Lorre with the rest of the kids and envied Bogie every blow he’d rained upon the little brute. And now I had my chance to get in some licks myself. Only the Lorre-like steward had picked up some tricks since the Maltese Falcon days, some tactics the old-time movie censors would never have allowed.

Right now, for instance, he had a firm grip on my left gonad and was gritting his teeth with the effort of trying to tear it from my body. I kept him from succeeding by slamming my foot into his shoulder. It made him relinquish his devilish grip, but he had another one up his sleeve. He flipped quickly and wrapped his legs around my throat. His ankles locked at the back of my neck, and I found myself writhing with the desperation of a fish out of water.

Maybe he was supposed to be the villain, but it was no time for the hero to have Marquis of Queensbury⁶ scruples. I managed to twist my head slightly and sank my teeth into the calf of his leg. I kept biting as hard as I could until his grip relaxed, and then I managed to wrench free. I shot to my feet, and so did he.

On the face of it, I suppose I should have had all the best of it. I outweighed him by fifty pounds, stood a foot taller, and had muscles where he had skinny, undersized bones. But anybody who’s ever seen a Peter Lorre movie will appreciate the fact that the cunning knowhow of my adversary more than made up for what he lacked in bulk.

He used his head. Like a battering ram—that’s how he used it. The moment we were both on our feet, he ducked under the punch I threw and rammed my Adam's apple with his noggin. While I was choking, I landed a karate chop on the back of his neck.

It was only a glancing blow, but it rocked him. His knees buckled, and he grabbed at me for support. But he made the grab as aggressive as he was able. He got both hands on my beard and yanked as hard as he could, trying to pull me off balance as he fell. But all he succeeded in doing was tearing the phony beard loose from my face. This threw him even farther off balance, and I finished him off -- for the time being-—with a knee slammed into his descending jaw.

He lay quietly at my feet now, my beard still clutched in his hands like some fallen battle pennant. I turned on the light and looked down at him. He was out cold. I got the beard loose from his fingers and went into the bathroom where I put it back on as best I could. I picked up my eye-patch from the floor where it had fallen during the fight and also put that back on. By then my Lorre-like sparring partner was beginning to stir. I pulled him to his feet and hustled him out of the cabin.

“Where are you taking me, good sir?” he whined nasally.

“To the Captain,” I told him. “He’ll know how to deal with a thief on board his ship.”

I had to pound on the captain’s cabin door to rouse him. His eyes shot open wide when he saw the marks of the fight still on us. He held open the door of the cabin so we might come inside.

“What has happened, Mr. O’Ryan?” he asked when I didn’t relinquish my arm-twisting hold on the steward.

But my prisoner beat me to the answer. “This man iss not what he seems,” the steward hissed Lorre-ishly. “Believe me, Captain, he iss up to no good. His beard iss false. And he doesn’t really need that eye-patch. It iss only a part of his disguise. I do not even think that he iss Irish. He spoke to me before without a trace of a brogue.”

I made a mental note to thank the little bum for reminding me about the brogue. It had indeed slipped before. I made sure it was there when I spoke to the Captain now. “Sure an’ this little feller was ransackin’ me cabin, Captain,” I told him. “ ’Twas a terrible fight he put up afore I was able to subdue him. What I want you to be findin’ out is just what he was afther among me belongin’s.”

“Why should he have been after anything special, Mr. O’Ryan?” the Captain asked shrewdly. “He’s simply a thief. That’s all. I’ll see that he’s taken care of.” He took a gun out of his bureau drawer. “You may leave him with me,” he said. “I’m sorry that you were victimized this way. But it is fortunate that you caught him.”

So_I went back to my cabin and finally did go to sleep. The sun was very bright in the South China Sea sky when I was shaken awake. I blinked, sure that I must still be asleep. But the blinking didn’t help. I still found myself looking up at Bogey’s nemesis, mine now, green-faced and corrupt, a white bandage splitting his cheek like some old scar received dueling with Sidney Greenstreet⁷ in Old Heidelberg.

“Luncheon will be served soon, sir,” the steward told me, his whine servile and distant now, no sign in his voice that last night had ever happened.

“What the hell are you doing here?” I exploded.

“I have been sent by the Captain to tell you that luncheon will be served soon, sir,” he repeated precisely and with only a very vague hint of a triumphant sneer underlying the words.

“Why aren’t you in the brig? Or whatever passes for a brig on this tub?”

“The Captain did consider imprisoning me, good Sir. But he decided against it since there would be no one to replace me as steward.”

“Oh, he did, did he? Well, we'll just see about that.” I flung on my clothes and stormed out of the cabin.

“Pardon me, sir,” the steward called after me, “but your slip of the lip iss showing.”

“Huh?”

“Your brogue, sir. You’ve misplaced it.”

I cursed under my breath and marched up to what passed for the dining salon. The Captain, the Mate, and Mavis were already at the table. “What’s the big idea o’ turnin’ that lizard loose?” I demanded Without preliminary greetings.

“Good morning, Mr. O’Ryan,” the Captain said politely. “We were just talking about you. We were wondering if we should have the pleasure of your company at luncheon. We missed you at breakfast.”

“Top o’ the mornin’ to you, too.” I played the game.

“An’ we might be dispensin’ with the pleasantries for a moment, perhaps you’ll be good enough to answer my question. How is it now that you’ve thieves runnin’ around loose on board your ship?”

“My word! ” Mavis exclaimed.

“Do not be alarmed, Madame,” the Captain calmed her. “Mr. O’Ryan is merely a bit agitated. I fear he had a difficult night and has not yet quite recovered from it. In answer to your question, Mr. O’Ryan—-” He turned to me. “—you can hardly expect to run this ship properly without the services of a steward. It might be possible if there were no passengers to be looked after. But there are. And I would also have to relieve another sailor from duty to guard the steward if I decided to incarcerate him. Then I would be short two men. Now, let’s be honest, isn’t it better to allow him the freedom to perform his duties until I can hand him over to the authorities in Manila?”

“But, sure an’ the man’s a thief! ” I objected.

“Is he? What did he steal? I wasn’t aware that you were missing anything, Mr. O’Ryan.”

“Well, I don’t know that he succeeded in takin’ anythin’, but he did sneak into me room an’ ransack the belongin’s there!”

“I might say that was circumstantial evidence, Mr. O’Ryan.”

“Indeed now? Then why did he take after me like all the fiends in Hades?”

“You have a point there, Mr. O’Ryan. But let us not condemn the man without trial. The Manila authorities will deal with him. For the time, why don’t you just consider him as an accused man out on bail? And now sit down and eat your lunch, Mr. O’Ryan. The soup is really excellent today, and I fear yours may be getting cold.”

I cooled down and did as he suggested. Even if the Captain did have some vested interest in being lenient with the steward, there was nothing I could do about it. And that was true even if his vested interest meant that he was the one behind the steward’s searching my cabin in the first place.

“The Captain is right, isn’t he, Liam? Isn’t the soup excellent?” Mavis’s eyes were very bright and shiny, and I thought I saw the old invitation m them as they glittered at me.

“Aye. ’Tis a fine broth,” I agreed. I let my free hand slide under the tablecloth. This seemed as good a time as any to try to regain whatever ground I’d lost with my heavy-handed approach the night before. I found her knee and squeezed it.

I felt only silken stocking as I squeezed. There was no trace of the tweed skirt she was wearing. I guessed that she must have pushed it very high up and out of the way, as she’d done in the past. I let my hand drift higher up her leg until it was wandering over the burning flesh above her stocking-tops.

As usual, while I was so engaged, Mavis was carrying on a running conversation with the Captain. She gave no sign of what was happening under the tablecloth. Used to this pattern, I reacted to her stealthy movements by pushing my hand still higher. Another inch and Id be right at the entrance to her womanhood. Only another inch, but-—

But instead of landing on target, I found myself suddenly entwining fingers with another hand!

At first I thought it must be Mavis’s hand guiding me. Then I realized that it couldn’t be, unless it had sprouted hairy knuckles overnight. Also, the way it was squeezing mine was far from dainty, and very unfeminine indeed.

I took a quick hand-count. Both of Mavis s hands were on the table. The Captain was eating with one hand, and his chin was propped on the other. However, the Mate and I only had two hands showing between us.

Under the table, my hand was given a hearty squeeze. At the same moment, I saw the Mate shoot Mavis a hot-eyed look. She didn’t notice. I squeezed back, patted the hand between her legs as if to say it was doing fine and should go on about its business, and retrieved my own hand. My claim had been jumped, but for the time being I was going to take it like a good sport. Besides, accomplished as Mavis was, there really wasn’t ore enough for two of us at one time in her palpitating passion-pit.

I waved away dessert, excused myself, and went out on deck. I noticed immediately that the destroyer was no longer tailing us. I could see it steaming away from us in the distance. It was heading over the horizon, back toward the coast of Vietnam.

Watching it disappear, I was reminded of the Captain’s' extreme stubbornness about having his cargo examined the night before. Why had he over-reacted the way he did? I wondered. Just what the devil was the cargo of the Luzona Maru?

I decided to bide my time until I might have the opportunity to find out for myself. It came later that afternoon. The Mate had organized the crew into a paint-scraping party on the forward deck. The Captain was on the bridge, and Mavis was in her cabin. I peeked into the galley to make sure the steward was there. He was, and that left nobody to see me slipping into the after-hold.

I felt my way down the narrow gangway and didn’t turn on the flashlight I’d brought until I was at the bottom. The hold was packed solidly with large, sealed metal containers. The air was thick with a peculiar odor; it smelled something like butter turned rancid. It was a sour aroma, and I wrinkled my nose against it.

The containers were vacuum-sealed. Concentrating on one of them, I tried to turn the lid. All my strength couldn’t budge it even a fraction of an inch. Spotting a crowbar against one of the walls in the hold, I picked it up and wedged it under a container lid. I pried energetically, and finally there was a hiss of inrushing air and the cover came loose. I removed it and shone the flashlight inside the container.

Milk! Rancid-smelling, curd-heavy, yellowish milk!

Now milk is milk to me, but even if I’m no expert, I would have bet that this was goat’s milk. And I would have stood by the wager that it was Maltese goats’ milk, at that. Nor would it have surprised me if a lab test should show that this milk was carrying the germs of Malta Fever.

It was another piece of the puzzle, and it fit nicely. There were many more pieces to come, but the vague beginnings of a pattern were beginning to be distinguishable. And I was damn sure that the pattern spelled out S.M.U.T.! It was no mere chance that Mavis had chosen this ship to sail on from Malta to Manila!

I reached into my breast pocket and came up with a fountain pen. I chose a dark corner to squirt the ink out. Then I dipped the pen into the milk and sucked up some of it into the ink sac. I put the cap back on the pen and the pen back in my pocket. Now, when I got to Manila, I’d be able to have the milk analyzed.

It wasn’t a perfect job, but I got the lid back on the container as best I could. If they didn’t look too closely, it might go unnoticed. Then I crept back up the staircase, waited until the coast was clear, and scooted back to my cabin.

I didn’t see anything of Mavis that evening, or all the next day. The day following, we rounded the tip of Luzon and headed back down south along the coastline toward Manila. We entered the half-moon shaped harbor in late afternoon.

We anchored at the mouth of the harbor, but we didn’t have to wait long. Evidently the docking authorities wanted to get us into our berth before sundown. They had a pilot out to us within a half-hour. We hove anchor again when he took over the helm and steamed slowly into the harbor.

“All packed and ready to disembark, Mr. O’Ryan?” I'd been standing at the rail and now it was Mavis at my elbow who was speaking.

“That I am,” I told her. “And what of yourself?”

“Oh, yes. I can’t wait to get off this dreadful old tub and onto dry land.”

“I’m hopin’ we’ll be seein’ each other in Manila,” I told her. “It’s been a right interestin’ sort of friendship, an’ I wouldn’t be wantin’ to lose it after we dock.”

“Of course we shall,” she said, surprising me with a warmth she’d never shown before. “I’m just as anxious not to lose track of you as you are not to lose track of me, Liam. I’m being met at the dock by my people. I’ll introduce you to them, and you can take their number and call me when you get the chance.”

“ ’Tis right happy I’ll be to make their acquaintance. I’ll bring me bags out on deck, and then we can go down the gangplank together. All right?”

“Why not have the steward do that?”

“He’ll be havin’ other things to attend to, I hope. Police matters an’ such. So you’ll be rememberin’ what the Captain said, anyway.”

“That’s right. I had forgotten for a moment. Well, I’ll just leave my bags and make arrangements to pick them up after we dock. You go and get yours now, though, if that’s what you want to do.”

When I came back with my luggage, we were just dropping anchor at the dock. A few moments later the gangplank was lowered. With a suitcase under each arm, I walked down it beside Mavis.

Halfway down I saw two uniformed officers of the Philippine National Constabulary starting up the gang-plank from the bottom. They looked pretty grim coming up with their revolvers drawn. I glanced back over my shoulder and thought I saw the reason for their demeanor. The steward was coming down the gangplank behind us, the Captain and the Mate on either side of him. For a moment, I was chagrined. I hadn’t really believed the Captain meant to have the little thief arrested. Then, suddenly, I wasn’t chagrined any more.

The two cops stopped right in front of Mavis and myself, blocking our way. “Are you Mrs. Wheatley?” one of them asked politely.

“Yes. I am,” she replied.

“Is this the man you wired us about?" The cop gestured his pistol toward me.

“Yes.”

“You’re under arrest,” the second cop told me. “Put your hands on top of your head.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “That’s the man you want.” I jerked my thumb over my shoulder at the steward, who was practically breathing down my neck in his eagerness to leer at the scene.

“Don’t let him distract you, officer,” the steward said. “He is a very dangerous man. That red beard of his iss false. He iss very clever.”

“Don’t worry,” the cop assured him. “Mrs. Wheatley wired us about his phoney eye-patch and his beard.” The cop turned to me. “She might never have spotted you if you hadn’t gotten mixed up and switched eyes with the patch.”

“Excuse me,” the Captain interrupted; “But if you have no need of us, we’d like to disembark. May we get past?”

"Of course, sir.” The cop tipped his hat politely.

I Watched as the three of them continued down the gangplank and onto the dock. The Captain actually had his arm around the latter-day Lorre’s shoulder in a sort of comradely embrace. The three musketeers—that’s what they looked like. A trio of scoundrels walking off scotfree while I stood there with my hands on my head.

“May I leave too?” Mavis asked the cop.

“Of course, madame. You will let us now where you are staying, of course. We will want you to testify. This man is the most wanted criminal in the Philippines right now. It was most fortunate that you were able to recognize him.”

“I’d have known him anywhere,” Mavis said as she edged past the cops and continued down the gangplank. “His disguise didn’t fool me for a moment. I knew he was Steve Victor.”

“Steve Victor!” The cop looked at me and shook his head. “Well, you certainly led us a merry chase. But we’ve got you now. Just keep your hands on top of your head and stay between us.”

“Okay,” I sighed. “But do you mind telling me what the charge is against me?"

“Murder!” he said. “As if you didn’t know, Victor. The charge against you is murder! ”

Murder, he said!

chapter eight

THE cops weren’t taking any chances. They had a paddy wagon waiting for me on the dock. The steward was standing a few paces away from it with the Captain and the Mate as the cops shoved me inside.

“Take it easy with that nightstick!” I exclaimed as one of them prodded me in the kidneys.

“Mr. O’Ryan,” the steward cackled. “Whatever hass happened to your Irish accent?”

“Ooh! Am I gonna give it to you if I ever get the chance!” I promised him.

His answer was a laugh, an insidious, top-Lorre laugh. It was the last thing I heard as the paddy-wagon door clanged shut behind me. The last thing I saw was the fast-darkening sky as night descended on the Manila docks.

Those docks, and the situation that prevails in the running of them, are unique. Since that uniqueness has a direct bearing on what followed, perhaps I’d better explain it. It’s the kind of setup that makes the jurisdictional disputes and murderous battles between longshoremen in New York seem like child’s play.

As I described it before, Manila’s harbor is shaped like a half-moon. In terms of the labor wars which constantly rage there, this half-moon is bisected. The two sections are known respectively as the north dock and the south dock.

The Luzona Maru had dropped anchor at the north dock. This is the area of the harbor which handles most industrial shipping. Smack in the center of it is the rear of the building which houses the U.S. Embassy. The front of the Embassy faces out on Dewey Boulevard, the main drag of the area. The rear extends out to the water and has docking facilities for pleasure craft used by the higher mucky-mucks among the U. S. diplomats.

The south dock is on Subic Bay. Most of it is taken up by the U. S. Naval Base there. It’s devoted mostly to the handling of military supplies and shipping. But the labor here, as on the north dock, is done by civilians. Unlike the north dock, it’s distributed by government contract.