The Girl From Peking

by George B Mair

  Immigration officials and two men whom she guessed were plain clothes policemen! But Bill Badams made it clear when he saw her that she had suffered enough, and together they stepped into a black Mercedes which dropped them at the Bank within minutes.

  Everyone was very English. She said little, but hinted at much, and in the end they got down to brass tacks. Signatures were compared. She gave them her husband’s letters. And she asked to see the necklace. It was brought up from the vaults and she almost gasped as she stared at the austere beauty of the carved stones lying on their bed of black velvet.

  Bill gently clipped it around her neck. ‘But there is one point. The insurance company will raise the premium if they know that it is being taken away from here. May I suggest that you see the valuators again? We can then take out an “all risks” policy. Safer that way.’

  In the end the company raised their premium when they were told that she wished to use the necklace. The Bank checked registration particulars, confirmed signatures and gave her a cheque book. Someone had also briefed them about the Peking trial and news flashes, so they had been expecting her. And the phrasing of the Ministry’s official statement had made it clear that they at least had no doubt as to her identity.

  She was advised to settle in for a few days at a country hotel near Stanley, and that evening Bill Badams entertained her to dinner. He was, as she had expected, the ideal host, but he insisted that after her illness and prison experience she must retire early. A couple of maids had been laid on by the house and she sank into her bath before eleven p.m. But they had not been allowed to undress her, and all weapons were concealed under her mattress. She had rated the maids as safe but one never knew, and she never let them out of her sight.

  After the bath they served her with a pot of tea and rice biscuits, a bowl of fruit and a packet of slender cigars—which showed that Bill had remembered at least one other thing and arranged that she be given a box of Romeo y Julieta Tré Petit Coronas. Which, even for Hong Kong, proved that Bill could almost work miracles.

  Then, reluctantly, she faced the inevitable and forced herself to kill time before setting the scene and calling a doctor. Black fish-net stockings hung over one chair. Lingerie, which could hardly have come from anywhere but Paris, lay discarded where she had dropped it on the floor, and she placed a volume of French poetry on the bedside table.

  A clock struck two ack emma. A Boeing through flight to Paris left at 15.05 hours and she had only thirteen hours to get organised.

  Her second scream brought in a night house boy who found her biting a chiffon scarf and with tears running down her cheeks. She had spread on a thin layer of dead white foundation cream, dimmed the lights and was kicking her legs hysterically.

  ‘A doctor,’ she screamed. ‘The best. Bring Professor MacFadzean.’

  She knew only the name, but the professor of medicine was an idea which appealed. And she was never to forget that she dealt only with top people. Though she guessed that the cautious and brilliant Scot who was professor at the medical school might well send one of his juniors. If so, then all the better. MacFadzean was no fool, and a junior might be easier to handle.

  The house boy padded off in a flurry, but moments later she was joined by one of her own maids and for almost an hour the girl bathed her face with water, held her hands and murmured reassuring words which meant nothing.

  Until the doctor arrived.

  It was not MacFadzean, but a senior assistant who was not enthusiastic about hysterical women. He listened to her story almost without interest. But she saw his eyes wander to the clothes lying near his feet, and to the book of verse near her pillow.

  ‘I must get away,’ she muttered again and again. ‘You don’t know these people. They could send someone to kill me. They’ll never forgive me for having shot that sailor.’ She forced her eyes wide open and hoped that the eye drops she had used would have dilated her pupils until they looked like saucers . . . a sure sign of real fear. ‘I must get away—but I’ve nowhere to go.’ She grasped the doctor by the wrist and gripped until she saw him wince with pain. ‘What can I do—Tell me for God’s sake . . . what can I do?’

  She had turned on the heat until she saw that even the doctor was almost frightened. And then she changed her mood, her eyes half closed and she allowed her lips to soften into a helpless smile of self pity. ‘Only you can help me, doctor, but I want to feel safe again. Please advise me. Tell me where to go.’ She forced a thin smile. ‘The French would say that I have the tristesse d’amour because although I long for him I want to feel that I am living again. After all, I’m still young and it is natural to want to wear lovely clothes or see beautiful people or flirt with men who really do know how to make love and not become scared at the last moment.’ She saw him swallow a yawn, and then, abruptly, he pulled out a small packet.

  ‘Take one of these every four hours and you’ll feel more sure of yourself. But I agree. It might be better to go away.’

  She watched him closely and asked the question which mattered, though he scarcely hesitated as he rose and walked towards the door. ‘Try France. Monaco or Paris sound like your cup of tea, Ma’am, and there is a flight this coming afternoon. Perhaps there’ll be a seat.’

  ‘Will I see you tomorrow?’

  He took a deep breath. ‘Contact me if you wish and I’ll see you with pleasure.’

  ‘And your bill, Professor?’

  He hesitated. ‘I’m not a professor but I can send it to your Bank if you’re not in the hotel. I’m sure it will be safe with a lady like yourself.’

  She could have laughed as she saw him flush at having passed a compliment. And then he was gone.

  She dialled the airport. There was a first class seat with Air France and she sent her maid over with a crossed cheque before switching out the lights. She was asleep within minutes but refused to be disturbed before mid-day when she dressed with more than usual care, lunched with Bill Badams and a Reuter man at the airport and took off on schedule.

  Between take-off and first touch down at Bangkok she reviewed her position and could find no fault. There had been some mention in morning gossip columns and she hoped for an interview.

  But it did not come until Delhi, three and a half hours later, when she held an informal press conference at the air terminal and was glad that the stop-over lasted only forty minutes. These correspondents were dynamite! But she left knowing that she had sewn seeds certain to root in many strange places.

  She then sent another radio message. This time to the Ritz in Paris and booked a suite of sitting room, bedroom and bath. Maksud knew that her expense account would be high, but it had been decided that she had to live as a glamorous millionairess, and Peking never hesitated to spend money where there was a worthwhile prospect of good dividends.

  She was asleep before Teheran and surfaced only after take-off at Rome. Toilet facilities on aircraft always irritated her. One was cramped for space. There was no elbow room. But she worked with grim concentration, adjusted her girdle until the outline of her knives was masked by the thickness of a tweed costume, and double checked that her thigh holsters, made especially for her own purposes and to her own design, were firmly anchored to suspender and stockings alike.

  Tania had a fine instinct for self-preservation, and knew that French never allowed admiration for a woman to cause a security slip-up. She also knew that she now rated as news, and that even then pale faced men would be considering her dossier in a drab little office near Quai d’Orfèvres. But they would have mightly little to go on! She guessed that French records of their days in Indo China—as Viet Namh had once been called—would be scanty, and with the President vaguely supporting the cause of Red China, Immigration might well be prepared to give her the benefit of every doubt. Especially since they could so easily arrange for different young men to grill her over a dining table, or when dancing, or even in bed. French security was top grade, but technique was refined, and she bet herself a pair of whit
e suède gloves that the most exciting young men available would be laid on to meet her in various salons, all briefed to win her confidence.

  She also guessed that they would give her an easy passage at Orly, and that officialdom would make up its mind at leisure. Meanwhile she would have to play her hand wide open and be suspect until everyone had given her an unqualified carte blanche.

  She bathed her face in Eau de Cologne and rubbed herself dry with a towelling cloth. She decided to do the unexpected and wear no make-up whatsoever excepting for a trace of eye shadow dusted along her eyebrows. The effect was startling and she knew that it was more effective than anything else she could think of.

  After that she could only eat a light breakfast . . . and wait.

  And then she felt her heart quicken as well-remembered shapes of Paris began to form, almost nebulously, below. A play of morning mist made them mysterious, and memories of David Grant again returned to raise a flush on either cheek. They had played together down there for over two years, looking for antiques in the side streets or at the Flea Market: collecting prints from booths on the river side: dining at Maxim’s and watching floor shows at the Lido. Together they had had their portraits done in crayon behind Sacré Cœur, and together they had flirted in the Bois, sipped Cinzano or Rom Bacardi on Champs Élysées and lived out the most passionate intimacy in Grant’s flat on Avenue de Villiers. In spite of having been in opposite camps, Tania who had so recently been Jacqueline, admitted that she had enjoyed it. Or most of it.

  A typical night had been the Opéra Comique or a concert and then late supper in a private room before returning to the flat for a last bottle of Le Montrachet or Volnay Blondeau with cheese and some dry biscuits which Grant imported from England. Sometimes the evening had ended simply like that, with a tranquil good night kiss on her lips or hands: but more often after a tumultuous togetherness on a bed which was one of Grant’s prides.

  A few buttons controlled a selection of devices which turned bed into sheer luxury. One produced a small side table which pivoted up from the frame just below the pillow. Another controlled a hinge apparatus which could angle the thing in the centre in a style which made sophisticated loving so much less tiring. Another button controlled a wash basin which swung out and up from below the bed itself and allowed one to wash at leisure without having to leave the comfort of an electrically controlled mattress with temperature adjusted to a degree or so below body heat. She also remembered that spray of perfume which could be fired from one of the uprights just above her pillow, and the ashtrays which sat on arms at exactly the correct length away from the sheets to make for comfort in smoking. Which also recalled the tiny cabinet of petit fours, cigars, cigarettes and minibottles of liqueurs which had been built into the quilted bedstead above their heads, and which was opened by pressing one of the studs. Grant’s bed must have cost a small fortune, but he was one of the few men she knew who could use a bed properly, for enjoyment, for rest, for work and for love.

  She felt wheels touch tarmac.

  The tell-tale flush faded from her cheeks and she actually felt her pulse rate drop to normal.

  She also remembered that top people carry nothing out of an airfraft and arranged for even small pieces to be off-loaded by staff.

  A battery of camera men were waiting, and she posed for five seconds while the first pictures were taken. One of the photographers seemed familiar. And then she remembered. His name was Robert Forestier and he belonged to ADSAD . . . the Administrative Department covering Security relating to Attack and Defence. This NATO spy organisation also employed Grant, and she had worked in it as secretary for long enough to spot at least some of the lower echelon members. Forestier was used for routine work. But his Polaroid photographs would be scrutinised before she even reached the hotel.

  She entered the bus which ambled to the terminal buildings. Forestier, she noted, had left by another route on a Honda scooter while another man used a grey car driven by a man who had plain clothes policeman written over his every inch.

  Formalities were brief, and in spite of heavy traffic she was unpacking in her suite within two hours of touch down.

  A message already awaited her. ‘Kindly accept these flowers, the gift of an unknown admirer to a beautiful lady.’

  They were a collection of twenty-one orchids and she guessed that a very acceptable young man would arrive before evening. The French, she always felt, did these things in a most civilised manner. But she also knew that the orchids meant the beginning of a period of observation which wouldn’t miss a trick.

  And before she sat down to her second breakfast she agreed to meet the press at coffee time in her room. News had come through from Delhi and she guessed that she was about to be launched.

  Chapter Four – ‘It is the small points which add up, you know’

  David grant paused at the door of his Chief’s office in that eighteenth-century nondescript looking house which was called Maison Candide.

  The house itself was a fully developed office, and a branch of ADSAD’s main NATO officies. But Rue Vaugirard was more private and Admiral John Silas Cooper arranged appointments there only when he graded them as of maximal importance.

  Something off-beat must now lie around the corner and Grant welcomed the change. Since that involved affair in Switzerland his position in the department had been difficult.

  The office, as usual, was warmly cosy. But the Admiral, seated with wrinkled face and hooded eyes behind a vast desk was neither smoking his usual pipe nor stuffing the bowl with tobacco. The atmosphere seemed menacing and the Admiral’s voice was edged with a quality of harshness which was one of his few give-aways when he was tense. ‘I don’t believe it, David,’ he snapped and handed over a photograph enlarged to something like one metre square. ‘This woman is too good to be true. Have you seen her before?’

  Grant pointed to an armchair. ‘May I sit down?’

  The Admiral made a growling noice which Grant took to be permission, and then rapped out: ‘Well?’

  ‘I’ve never seen her before.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Positive.’

  ‘No question of disguise?’

  ‘If so I can’t spot it.’

  ‘The face means nothing?’

  ‘Not a thing, sir.’

  The old man stared at him cynically. ‘It will,’ he said coldly. ‘And that right soon. You will dance with her tomorrow at a reception held by one of the secretaries attached to the Thailand Embassy.’

  Grant smiled contentedly. With a girl like that the arrangement couldn’t be faulted. ‘Why the interest, sir?’

  The old man returned the picture to a file. ‘I keep forgetting that you seldom read the papers but I would have thought that even you have heard something about a woman who has been tried for murder by Red China, deported after trial in camera and then discovered to be the widow of a millionaire spy who seems to have worked for the Nationalists in Viet Namh. But even if you hadn’t heard that surely you would have read that last night she attended the Opéra, was attacked by smash-and-grabbers on her way to a taxi and showed her expertise by shooting one of them before he could even reach his car. The sidewalk was crowded, as it always is after the Opéra, yet she drew a small calibre Browning from a thigh holster and shot him dead under bad lighting, but with considerable risk to innocent persons who might have got into the line of fire.’

  ‘A lady of parts.’ Grant remembered the photograph. ‘Of several parts. Mostly outstanding. So what happened?’

  ‘She demanded Embassy protection and told the press that she dealt only with “top people”.’

  ‘Did she get it? And which Embassy?’

  ‘She got it. And the British. It seems she has a British passport. Yet she has lived for a long time in China, claims to have travelled extensively in the back-woods, to have been treated buckshee for almost a year at Wuhan and then to have convalesced near Shanghai.’

  ‘And why was she deported?’ />
  The Admiral clenched his fist. ‘Because she also shot a man who attacked her near the docks there one evening. And I want, first, to know why an elegant creature like that was walking anywhere near the Shanghai docks at that time of night. Or walking at all. Even China has taxis.’

  Grant whistled softly. ‘Tell me more, sir. Especially about the husband.’

  The Admiral listed the facts. They were public property by now, and some of the articles had already been syndicated. She seemed to have no secrets. And it also seemed that her early admiration for the Chinese People’s Republic had been replaced by resentment at the way she had been treated after the shooting incident.

  ‘So how did the Dutch react?’

  ‘The ship’s captain kept head office informed and everyone seems to have written the whole episode off as an unfortunate incident, but understandably bearing in mind the usual conduct of deep water seamen on a shore side binge. It was the dead man’s bad luck that he met someone who could look after herself.’ He hesitated. ‘But twice, David. It isn’t reasonable. Girls of twenty-three don’t go bumping off men like that and rating a bull every time.’

  ‘Then what bothers you?’

  The Admiral had begun to walk up and down the room, using a Persian rug as though it were the bridge of ship. But Grant knew that he was thinking aloud. ‘She flew in here from Hong Kong two weeks or so ago. She talks to the press like a lover to his mistress, and she has taken a suite at the Ritz. It seems that during the Opéra attack one of the men whipped a jade necklace which is a museum piece. Her husband probably pinched it when he fled the country just as the Reds took over, and the stones are known in detail. They have even been photographed in colour and the insurance company is letting us have a print. Now that alone is a perfect story, but she has been launched into Parisian Society with every possible status symbol. The creature is alleged to be the wife of a dead Nationalist Chinese spy. She is said to have been on the French side during that botheration before Indo China became Viet Namh. She is loaded. But loaded. And she has clothes to beat Marlene Dietrich. She is a double murderess. Or at least she has killed two men in allegedly self defence. So that alone makes her interesting at parties. She must be a quality markswoman. She has already won a reputation for being an intellectual and by way of contrast something of an art critic. She speaks faultless Parisian French, but is familiar with Chinese and chatters English like a B.B.C. panelist. Non-stop given the right audience.’