Safari for Spies

The Diplomatic Touch

They had a glass of wine, and he asked about her shoulder. She told him, showed him, and they kissed.

The shoulder was no bother at all. Neither were the soft folds of the evening dress that slid, unhindered, down the full length of her desirable form. Her breasts were like small mountains begging to be scaled, and the peaks were rose-shaped lollipops demanding to be tasted.

There was time; he took it, and she made it fly. It was all so natural and irresistible that he scarcely noticed how it had begun. One moment they were fully dressed and sipping wine and talking about men who carried knives to fling at unsuspecting Second Secretaries, and the next moment they were naked together and hardly talking at all.

She drew him close to her with one wonderfully supple arm and let the other play gently over his tanned, muscular body. He touched the marvelous full breasts and tasted them, and held her close to him for some time without moving just to feel the soft, firm length of her against him. She matched him perfectly. His hard muscles strained against her pliant strength and soon he was no longer lying quietly beside her but discovering her urgently. There was a perfume about her that was not Paris or New York or London but just Liz — a kind of clean freshness that reminded him of fresh-cut grass and freshwater mountain streams. And there was an exuberance about her that was not wanton but exhilarating. He buried his face in her hair while his arms encircled her body and said things that surprised him.

“I want to be with you in a haystack,” he murmured, “with the hay in your hair and all over you. I want to roll you over in it and make you laugh so you can’t breathe, and love you till you lie back gasping. I want to take you on the beach, in the sand and under the water, and dry you myself and make love to you again. And I want you now... right now... I want you now.”

Their mouths melted together and their bodies clung. Her warmth and gentleness enveloped him and he sank himself into the fullness of her body, excited by the wonderful size and shape of her and elated by her response to him.

By unspoken consent they prolonged each moment and lived it to the fullest, luxuriating in each lingering sensation and repeating it in half a dozen different, delicious ways.

She laughed once, in the middle of a voluptuous sigh.

“What is it?” he asked idly, fondling the luscious mound of her left breast and watching it come into flower.

“Just thinking of my position,” she whispered. “Lady diplomat of rank. And yours. Special emissary, awesomely important...”

“I try to be special,” he said modestly. “And as for your position, it is almost perfect.”

What she could do with her magnificent body and all its large-scale wonders was a revelation and delight. She was absolute comfort and contentment, a refuge after a long journey, a refuge that offered its own thrills and surprises.

He went on thinking in terms of haystacks and beaches and soft grass while they clung together and moved in a perfect rocking rhythm that was tranquility and excitement wrapped up in one. She was like some glorious slightly-larger-than-life statue suddenly and miraculously come to life. No; that was wrong. She had never been a statue, never been cold. Then she was mother earth, embracing him, doing these incredibly delicious things to him. Uh-uh. Liz was nibbling his ear and swiveling against him in a provocative way that suggested the favorite of the harem rather than a mother. And the things she breathed into his ear were not for children. Then she was a mountain that lay beneath a blanket of deceptively soft grass and pretended to be tranquil until the giant came to rouse her... He hadn’t known he could be so fanciful. He was getting lightheaded with the wonder of her. Every move of hers was sudden pleasure laced with lingering magic; each touch of trailing fingertip and tightening of firm young muscle was a new excursion into a world of forbidden delights that suddenly were his.

The mountain was only pretending to be tranquil. It shivered and shook and changed color and turned into a volcano.

Two beautifully muscled, finely tuned and energetic bodies merged and clashed and merged again. Mountains, statues, beaches, soft grass all be damned. These were two people of more than ordinary proportions and bigger-than-everyday passions, making uninhibited and galvanic love on a giant-size sofa in a house belonging not exactly to a giantess but to a passionate witch with nothing small about her — neither her perfect body nor her capacity for love and laughter nor her enthusiasm for life. They joined together in a crescendo of emotion and physical sensation and stretched the moment of perfection for an incredibly long time. And then the earth moved and the room turned upside down.

At last they lay back, panting. Liz released a long, tremulous sigh. Nick’s own body was trembling with the aftershock. He let the tremors roll away and then pulled her close to him again so that he could feel the heavenly breasts against his chest. They lay together with eyes half-closed, arms around each other, until their breathing became steady and the warm glow of release seemed to fill the room. And then they talked a little, just to get to know each other.

She sat up suddenly and said: “Abe Jefferson.”

Nick sat up too. “You mean you checked this with him, too?”

“Silly.” She grinned at him. “He’ll be here soon. He wants to talk to you.”

“Oh Christ, that’s right.” He started pulling on his clothes. Liz disappeared into the bathroom and came back in seconds wearing a long hostess gown that made her look dignified and desirable at the same time. Nick was busy with drinks, fixing something tail and cold and refreshing after the love and wine. His tie was slightly crooked and his thick hair, sometimes so slick, flopped down over one eye. His jacket straddled the back of a chair.

“Does Abe have the password?” he asked, handing her a drink. “We can’t let just anybody in here, you know.”

“Oh, yes.” She sipped gratefully. “It’s something I remember from when I was a little girl, and the boys used to say it: ‘Button your lip, pull up your zip...’ ” She stopped suddenly and blushed. “I don’t know what there is about you that makes me say things like that. But you’d better put your jacket on.”

Nick slid into his jacket and regarded her with interest. “You must have been a depraved little girl. Under what circumstances did you hear this particular rhyme?”

“Never mind. Straighten your tie.”

The doorbell gave off three short, sharp bursts of sound. Liz glanced swiftly into a pocket mirror and dabbed powder on her nose. Nick stood there laughing at her.

“Please,” she said. “Your glasses. Your dignity. Your stuffed shirt. What have you done with them?”

He transformed himself for her, starting by slicking back his hair and ending by assuming a pompous air.

“Only I don’t think Abe Jefferson particularly expects it of me,” he said as he completed the transformation. “But I’d better keep up appearances — you’re absolutely right.”

The doorbell rang again. Liz started toward it.

“I’ll get it,” said Nick. “You stay out of line of the door. Get over in the corner. And this time do as I say.”

Liz stepped aside a little shamefacedly. Nick went to the door. “Who is it?” he called.

“Jefferson.” It was Abe, unmistakably. “But be careful how you open the door. Don’t make yourself a target.”

Nick clicked the latch and drew the heavy door in toward him, stepping back with it and using it as a shield. He let one eye peer cautiously around the edge to seek the dimly lit figure of Abe Jefferson, standing expectantly on the far side of the door frame.

“Get him, sergeant,” Jefferson said softly. There was a movement in the shrubbery behind him.

For one incredulous moment Nick thought the Chief of Police had ordered an attack on him. And the second moment almost proved it.

A sizzling bolt of lightning flashed into the room and lashed at the far wall before rebounding onto an overstuffed chair and then onto the carpeted floor. It lay there smoking and sizzling and giving off little tongues of flame.

“What the hell!” Liz cried out indignantly, and made a move toward the flaming object.

“Oh, for the luvva Christ do as I tell you and stay where you damn well are!” Nick roared back, even as he leapt with one arm outstretched to slam the door shut and the other reaching for the burning thing.

The flames flickered out as he touched it. It was a burnished assegai with a razor-sharp arrowhead of a tip, and it smelled of gasoline. If it had hit anyone, it could have killed. And if it had landed on something instantly flammable, it would have made the most godawful of messes.

Wheels screamed on the rough pavement outside and someone hammered on the door.

“Come on, Carter, let me in.” Abe Jefferson sounded plaintive. “I have a man going after him. Open up!”

Nick opened the door, still holding the wicked spear.

“You sure there aren’t any more? I thought it was your calling card.”

Abe Jefferson gave him a curdling look and closed the door behind him.

“It is not my calling card. Miss Ashton, I am so very sorry.”

Liz came out of her corner with the fight gone out of her.

“Abe, you look as though you haven’t slept for weeks. Sit down and have a drink.”

Jefferson sat down with a groan of exhaustion. “Thank you, but I do not drink on duty.”

“You’re not on duty in my house,” Liz said decisively, and poured him a healthy dose of imported Bourbon on the rocks. Nick fingered the still-warm assegai and told himself that incidents not of his own making had gone far enough.

Jefferson gulped his drink gratefully and sighed.

“I see there was no message attached to that,” he said. “But it was not aimed exclusively at you. Every American in town has had one of those tonight. Dick Webb of the Embassy caught one in the shoulder. The Patricks put out a fire in their living room. And Tad Fergus came home to find his bedroom smoldering. The others were like this — they fortunately did no damage. Some of them came with a message. The message said: ‘Yankee murderers go home.’ It is obvious that this town is at fever pitch. This is misguided retaliation.” He drained his glass and added, “At least, I hope it is misguided.”

“It’s misguided,” Nick said quietly, “but I don’t think it’s retaliation. Like the bombing of the Embassy. Did you know that the same bombs were used in the bombing of the Russian Embassy and ours?”

Jefferson stared at him. “We do not have facilities for comparing that sort of evidence,” he said stiffly. “That is not the report we had from Moscow.”

“No, perhaps not. But that’s the report we had from Moscow and our own laboratories. What’s happening is a calculated double-play. First put Americans in a bad light, then try to scare them off with this phony retaliation stuff. But we don’t scare off. And we don’t fall easily for put-up jobs. I was hoping you don’t, either. In the light of all that’s happened today... Oh, by the way, did Hakim get home safely?”

Abe Jefferson’s strained face broke into a smile. “Yes, thank God; at least that one thing went right. He spoke most highly of you. We put a watch on that herbalist’s shop, as you suggested. There are two little rooms upstairs and the old man lives in one of them, or so they tell us at the Beauty Shop. The crone who runs it, who calls herself Helene, knows practically everything that goes on in her neighborhood. She says that a man named Laszlo, whom she describes as being turtle-faced and snaky, has been occupying the other room on and off for the last six months. Sometimes she doesn’t see him for weeks, and then he comes and stays for several days. He returned yesterday, after an absence of a week or so, and then he must have gone out during the night since he came back twice again today — first quite early, soon after she opened, and then again between one-thirty and two. She also saw you, and described you as being very handsome and distinguished but rather high-nosed. ‘Thinks he’s bloody important,’ is what she said.” He grinned. His tiredness seemed to have peeled off him and his humorous eyes were alert.

“Very perceptive old bag,” Nick observed without rancor. “And since then?”

“Laszlo went out once, to eat. For the rest he seems to have been clinging to that room. As you know, we have no right or reason to search it or question him. Nor to tap the old man’s telephone, which we find has an extension upstairs. As for the various eavesdropping devices in your room, we found their source in the room above yours. Though we were ready to catch any hasty departures after we ripped the wires out, nobody left. And nobody was there. There was a tripping device to work a tape recorder when you used your telephone, and another slow-running recorder listening into your room. Obviously, whoever placed them there need only return at a convenient time to play back the tapes. So naturally we staked out the room and the corridors with subtly concealed individuals, and waited. Oh, we were most clever.” His tone dripped self-contempt. “The only person who came near the room was the electrician with a neat little tale of checking a short in the landing wires. He went about his business and left. It was not until hours later, when Stonewall came back to check on his men, that we realized an electrician was the very man for the job. By that time he had vanished. We have a description, but we have lost him completely.”

“Was anyone registered for that room? Were any outgoing calls made from it?”

Jefferson looked at Nick with a certain respect. “I’m afraid that is something that took us some time to think of, too. No, the room was supposed to be empty. This is not a busy time of year for the Hotel Independence — even though that is where everybody who is anybody at all stays when they come to Abimako. No calls have been made from it since it was last officially occupied. But the desk clerk — also something of a gossip, like the impossible Helene — saw the hotel’s electrician use the public phone booth in the lobby twice this morning. The first time was apparently while we were at the hospital. He is very vague about the second time; around lunchtime, he thinks.”

“So the chances are he was reporting to someone,” said Nick.

Liz glided about quietly, refilling the glasses and flashing approving looks alternately at Nick and Jefferson.

“It’s not that I want to drag myself into your exclusively male conversation,” she said at last, “but might not our knifer-with-the-embarrassed behind be able to shed some light on that? His orders surely must have come from whomever the electrician reported to.”

The Chief’s look was bitter. “He is as innocent as the day is long. He just happened to be passing by, broke and hungry, and he nipped in to look for money. We can’t shake him. Not yet, that is. We’re trying. Same with the characters we caught in the car that tried to run you down, Carter. They wanted to scare you off because they hate Americans, they said. And that’s all we’ve managed to get out of them.”

“How about the fellow with the cloak? The one I put to sleep?”

“Picked him up to keep him from reporting back. He’s cooling off until he talks, but he might as well have bitten his tongue out...”

It was the same story over and over again. The dead couldn’t talk and the live ones wouldn’t. The pattern was repeated when Stonewall arrived with Nick’s baggage and a report on the throwers of the flaming spears.

“Found one, killed one,” he reported glumly. “The live one is as silent as the dead. Glassy-eyed with hemp when we picked him up and now does nothing but shiver and moan.”

The last cheerful bulletin of the evening was that the President was hovering on the brink of death and that the news of his condition would have to be made public if there was no improvement within the next two hours or so.

Abe Jefferson stumbled off to bed and said he’d call as soon as he heard anything new. Nick showered, kissed Liz very tenderly and lay beside her until she drifted into sleep. Then he rose silently and put on his working clothes.

It took time to ease himself out of a rear window silently enough to avoid Abe’s watchers. Even then he scrunched on the gravel when he thought he was clear and had to wait for nearly half an hour in the shadows before he was sure of himself. After that it was easy going under the intensely black African sky, and he reached the corner of the Avenida Independencia without encountering anyone.

The Avenue itself was more of a challenge. He waited on his corner until he could distinguish the watchdogs in the gloom, and he began to wish that Abe hadn’t been so thorough. There were at least three men watching the front of the herbalist’s shop from various angles. The lane at the back was a different proposition. It was open at one end only, and there was a solitary watcher across from it, pacing back and forth like a leopard in a cage. Abe must have been running short of qualified men; the fellow was not a clever watcher. He was obvious, and he was bored. He was so obvious that Nick was not the first one to get past him.

Nick flitted silently into the lane and clung like a slowly moving shadow to the rear walls of the low buildings fronting on the Avenue. Surely, he thought, there should have been another watcher in the lane.

He was right. There had been. He lay at the far end of the lane with his face in a dark, sticky pool, the back of his head dented hideously and matted with drying blood. Nick paused long enough to be sure that nothing could be done for him and to draw on the special fingerprintless, skin-thin gloves made for him by AXE’s Editing Department.

He counted back doors until he knew he was behind the herbalist’s shop. There were no lights showing from within, and the lock gave without a struggle against Nick’s Lockpickers’ Helper. His pencil beam swept the shop and found it empty of everything but the junk he’d noticed earlier. He retraced his steps to the back stairway and started climbing stealthily, one hand lightly on the rail and the other holding the lethal Wilhelmina. A sagging stairboard complained like a startled cat and he froze for moments, waiting. Nothing stirred.

There were two doors on the tiny landing, both closed but neither of them locked. He fingered one open, very quietly, and sidled in. Still there was no sound. His small flashlight flicked on and probed around a tiny, filthy room with shuttered windows, an unmade bed and several rickety sticks of furniture, including a battered old armchair. The beam caught the chair and held it.

The room’s occupant sat slumped in the chair at a curiously awkward angle. The clothes it wore were those of an upperclass workman, a foreman of some kind or possibly an electrician. The shirtfront was dreadfully stained. Nick catfooted over and raised the head.

It grinned horribly at him. The grin was under the chin, and it stretched from ear to ear in hideous welcome. Nick let the head fall onto the bloodstained chest and swiftly scanned the rest of the room. Empty food cans and a grimy spoon in the closet. Thick dust under the bed. Nothing in the open bureau drawers but little scraps of trash.

He doused the light and crept quietly across the tiny landing to the other room. It was very much the same as the first one, except that it was cleaner and the bed was occupied.

His flashlight beam shone down on the dark face, against the pillow. Two eyes stared back at him. Two old, stone-cold dead eyes.