The Python Project

by Victor Canning

  He came up to me as I stood at the fruit machine. He was wearing a dinner jacket and looked cool, confident and in no mood for nonsense. He gave me a warm smile and a friendly nod, neither of which meant anything. With him, also in evening clothes, was an enormous man whose face was familiar. I remembered then that he had been one of the two men in Duchêne’s Paris flat when I had walked in on their search. Then I had taken him for a bruiser. Now, although he was twice as big, I saw that he was out of the Manston school.

  Manston looked at him and said, ‘Perkins. This is Carver.’

  ‘We’ve met,’ I said. ‘He’s a dab hand with pot plants.’

  ‘Sorry we had to be a bit rough with you, old boy.’ He had a gravelly, educated voice, full of charm, reassuring. He’d probably got a blue for rugger at Cambridge. I could just see those big shoulders battering away in the scrum.

  ‘I want you,’ said Manston, ‘to get out of this town.’

  ‘I’m thinking of doing that.’

  ‘I want you, too, to forget you ever heard of Messrs Freeman and Dawson. You know why, of course.’

  I nodded. ‘You’ve done a good job stopping any publicity.’

  ‘There’s never going to be any. Also, if you’ll excuse the crudity, there are not going to be any pickings in this for you.’

  ‘I haven’t been thinking along those lines. I’ve got plenty of money at the moment.’

  ‘Then live to enjoy it,’ said Perkins. He slipped a coin into the machine, jerked the handle and got a bigger dividend at once than I’d had so far.

  ‘It’s like that, is it?’ I looked at Manston.

  ‘It’s just like that. Take a vow of silence right now—and that includes talking in your sleep. Go away and forget.’

  ‘Do that,’ said Perkins. ‘We haven’t got time to be bothered with any monkey tricks. Just begin one and I’ll break your neck and drop you in the sea. We’ll issue a D-notice so that you don’t even get four lines in the evening papers.’

  ‘Why,’ I asked Manston, ‘have I never had the pleasure of meeting this number before? I should have thought he was too big and obvious for your service.’

  ‘Far East, old boy,’ said Perkins. ‘Only just come back to home service.’

  ‘Just forget Freeman and Dawson,’ said Manston. ‘That way we can go on being friends when we have to.’

  ‘Charming. Okay—I won’t say a word. But somebody will. You’ll never keep this out of the press.’

  ‘Our instructions are that we must. So we will. Understood?’

  ‘Yes. And what happens to them when you catch up with them?’ Perkins winked. ‘We break their necks and drop them in the sea, and then cover that with a D-notice.’

  ‘I might be able to help.’

  ‘We don’t want it. Just go home and chase insurance cheats; live a full life and a long one,’ said Manston.

  ‘If you insist. How’s the big man taking it? And I don’t mean Sutcliffe.’

  ‘Sincerely and frankly,’ said Perkins, ‘the big man is hopping bloody mad—and, of course, worried, as any decent parent would be.’

  ‘As a matter of interest,’ I said idly, ‘where was the snatch made? Up the coast a bit at a place called Sabratha?’

  Neither of them moved a muscle.

  I grinned. ‘You shouldn’t have too much trouble. Not with a guy like Freeman. He couldn’t even fake his own death convincingly. I’ll bet he’s biting his nails now trying to work out some foolproof method for the ransom money to be handed over. A clever man would have had that one settled before he took the first step. Yes, I can see that you don’t need my help in dealing with an incompetent like that.’

  ‘If we ever do need you,’ said Perkins affably, ‘don’t think we won’t be able to find you.’

  ‘You will be leaving tomorrow,’ said Manston. It wasn’t a question. It was an order.

  I nodded, always polite, and moved away because I had just seen Letta come to the door of the gaming room.

  So, secondly, there was Letta. La Piroletta. Leon Pelegrina’s daughter. I wondered whether Manston knew that connection. He would know about Paulet and Duchêne. He might know about the steam yacht La Sunata. But what he didn’t know, clearly—otherwise he would never have been wasting any time here—was where Pelegrina and Freeman were at this moment. I might be a jump ahead of him there. But what could I do about it? I’d offered to help and had been told to go and chase insurance cheats. That hurt my pride. Not that I worried over that. The pain was minimal.

  So, as I said, secondly there was Letta in a yellow silk gown, a scrap of mink over her shoulders, dark dusky skin making my fingers tremble to touch it and her dark, deep, brilliant eyes afire with the thought of a big plate of pasta and a flask of Chianti for two.

  We got it at an Italian restaurant in the town, a jolly place with check tablecloths and little vases full of plastic flowers. Six men in from the desert, forgetting the sand and the oil rigs as they cut into big steaks and washed the meat down with neat whisky, stopped only for a moment to follow Letta with their eyes as we passed their table.

  She ate pasta in a way that was right out of my class and she took more than her share of the Chianti, and she was bright with chatter and laughter and held my hand under the table when she wasn’t holding a fork or glass. Anyone looking on would have thought there wasn’t a cloud in her sky. Personally I wondered what the hell she was so determined to conceal. Much later I did find out—but not from her. I realized then that she was just hopping mad . . . with her father. Maybe that was why, on the swing back, she was so kind to me. All I needed was a little kindness to encourage me.

  We walked back along the sea front, long after midnight. Although I was happy, and had one arm in hers, it was the left one. I wasn’t going to be taken off my guard again. I didn’t have to ask whether I had passed muster, all her actions indicated that I had been accepted as a custom-built job. She clearly was a quick shopper, knew what she wanted and when she found it paid cash down. It took the romance out of life a bit for me. Let’s face it, I’m the kind whose performance is better if both parties subscribe a little to the illusion of love. . . . Well, it’s cosier that way at the time, even if you both know that it isn’t going to last.

  We had a nightcap in her room, ran pleasantly through the few, obligatory preliminaries—me, wanting to linger a bit longer over them, she not indecently hasty but anxious to have them out of the way—and then she got up, said something about giving her five minutes and went into the bedroom. I was happy to give her the time. Her handbag was on the small table and I fished out her address book. It was one of those jobs with an alphabetical cut-out down the side. I tried F for father and got nothing, then P for Pelegrina or Papa and got nothing, and then found it under L for Leon. The flat in the Piazza Santo Spirito and its number was listed, and then under that came:

  Villa La Sunata, Bizerta. 27.103.

  I put the book back. He had a yacht called La Sunata, and also a villa. Obviously the name had a sentimental or pleasing meaning for him. I wondered if it had been the name of Letta’s mother. I made a note to ask her at the first chance.

  The thought went right out of my head when I went into the bedroom. She was sitting on the edge of the bed quite naked, her hair tied up at the back with a broad piece of red ribbon. I didn’t rush things. After all, if you’re being presented with something out of the grand cru class you don’t gulp, you take it easy, missing none of the cumulative pleasures of sight, touch and taste. Her skin was an even light-biscuit colour. Her breasts had a beauty which made me feel a little heady, and she had one of those narrow little waists that flowered out to broad hips and then on to long, breathtaking legs. She sat there and gave me a little smile of delight for the wonder in my eyes.

  I said, ‘Don’t you wear a nightdress?’

  ‘Normally, yes,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. Have I robbed you of the pleasure of taking it off?’

  ‘No. I was just making conversation.’


  ‘Don’t bother. I’m not in the talking mood.’

  She put her arms out towards me and the lift of her shoulders did things to her breasts that boosted me right off the launching pad and into orbit. We went into outer space together, and I wasn’t caring if we never came back.

  *

  I woke to feel her naked body pressed close up against my back. Through drowsy eyes I could see that the room was full of half-dawn light coming through the partly drawn curtains. Outside a strong wind was making a hissing noise through the palms in the garden. There was the creak and rattle of an anchor chain coming up from one of the cargo boats in the harbour. I closed my eyes and drifted back into paradise. Behind me I felt her move to readjust our combined body contours, and dreamily I thought, Why ever wake properly, why ever bother to move out into the shoddy half-baked world? The thing to do was to turn back, away from the world, and hide oneself in the tight rosebud of drowsy pleasure; to become larvae, just the two of us, hidden forever in the dark, sweet world of the ripening apple. . . . I smiled in half-sleep, knowing that somewhere I was getting mixed in my thoughts and not caring. Behind me she stirred. I felt her arms move slowly, caressingly, over the bare warmth of my neck and then slide across my cheek, the long length of her arm running after it over my naked shoulder. Her hand and arm were cold. She must have been sleeping, I thought, with the top half of the covers off. Full of tenderness, not wanting her to be cold, I began a lazy turn that would bring her into my arms and let me pull the sheet up around her bare shoulder. My eyes opened slightly in the move and I found myself looking into a small, wedge-shaped head, flat and—although much thicker—about the size of an axe-head. From low on the crown a pair of yellow-brown eyes watched me coldly. A little red, delicately forked tongue flicked the tip of my nose and then the head moved with a little curving movement away and over me and I felt the dry, relaxing and then muscular constricting of the long scaly body across my bare chest.

  As my hair stood on end and my body stiffened, a detached part of my mind was wondering at the association of ideas that could go on in the brain while the body slept. Paradise, the sweet ripe apple . . . me and Letta in the garden of Eden and here, to complete it, was the snake. And a damned great thing at that. Just feeling it move across my chest told me that it wasn’t an inch under ten feet. It dropped off the bed with a clumsy thump—I learned later that pythons have that in common with Siamese cats, an arrogance which makes them clumsy, just going their own sweet way across tables or furniture, knocking over anything that gets in their path.

  I sat up in bed with a jerk and cursed myself for not retrieving my gun from Wilkins. The python was rippling away across the room with a nice easy flowing movement. It did a figure of eight round the legs of a chair and then, unhurried, spiralled up a tall lamp standard to check that the bulb was a 120-watt.

  I said with a terminal hiss that any snake could have been proud of, ‘Holy Moses!’

  The sound and the proceeding jerk of my body made Letta roll over.

  ‘Whassa?’ she asked sleepily.

  I looked down at her. She was naked almost to the waist and her position flattened her beautiful breasts a little. The areola around each nipple was a dark, crushed-grape colour. Even with your hair standing on end you notice things like that.

  I said, ‘There’s a bloody great snake in the room.’

  She opened her eyes and smiled at me. ‘There always is, darling—of one kind or another.’

  ‘But this—’ I gagged for a moment because my throat was dry—‘is a damned great python affair. You could make a pair of shoes and a couple of handbags out of it.’

  She sat up, running her hands through her disordered hair. She looked across the room where the python was doing a complicated backward slide down the lamp standard.

  ‘That’s Lilith,’ she said.

  ‘What’s she doing here?’

  ‘She lives in that hamper over in the corner. She always comes out in the morning for a little exercise. She worries you?’

  ‘Not really. It’s just my hair I’m thinking about. I’ll never get it to lie down again.’

  She giggled, a rich, warm, early morning, dark-brown sound, and then climbed across me, almost making me forget the snake. She padded across the room, picked up Lilith by a convenient loop, draped her across her shoulders, faced me and sketched a quick bump and grind. As a cabaret act it would have given a Freudian scholar stuff for two or three chapters, and then a hefty footnote on symbolism.

  She kissed the beast on the nose and said, ‘You are happier if I put her away?’

  ‘Definitely. And see the catch is secure.’

  She padded to the hamper, folded Lilith away with a bending rump-and-buttock exhibition that made me reach for the water carafe to slake my snake-parched mouth.

  She came back, took a flying leap into bed and lay back laughing. Then she grabbed for me and, in the few moments before speech became impossible, said, ‘I will make you unafraid again. One man once, you know, had the same experience and had a bad heart attack. There was a lot of explaining to do.’

  Later, lying relaxed, hearing Lilith curl and knot in the hamper, I said, ‘You use her in your act?’

  ‘Didn’t you see it last night?’

  ‘I was late getting here. But it doesn’t say anything about it on the showcards in the hotel hall.’

  ‘It is only a small part of the act. I use it as a surprise. And anyway, Lilith is sometimes in a bad temper and won’t act nicely.’

  ‘What gets her steamed up? Nostalgia for the past?’

  ‘Guinea pigs. They are her exclusive diet. Sometimes it is difficult to get them. Then, when she is hungry, she gets temperamental.’ That wasn’t hard to believe. I know a lot of people who get bad tempered if they don’t get their food regularly.

  ‘I see now,’ I said, ‘why Freeman had no trouble selling you that python bracelet. Is Lilith an Indian python too?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I lit a cigarette. She took it from me, had a couple of draws and then handed it back. Staring up at the ceiling, she said, ‘Something else. I don’t want you to worry about my father any more.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I telephoned him yesterday.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the Florence flat. He had returned. He swore to me he was not at the moment engaged in any business enterprise. Nor was he in any kind of trouble.’

  ‘You believed him?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  I said nothing. One thing was certain, however; I didn’t believe her. She’d telephoned him all right. But not in Florence. He was somewhere near Bizerta. But I was prepared to believe that he had reassured her about his business enterprises at the moment. He would have to. And I guessed that she must have mentioned my name and whereabouts to him. That’s why—from a piece of quick telephoning on his part—I’d had my shirt front ripped last night.

  I said, ‘Why did your father call his boat La Sunata?’

  ‘Because of my sister. She died when she was sixteen. She was very beautiful. More than me. Also she was his favourite.’

  Moving over on to one elbow, looking into her dark eyes, I said, ‘I’m leaving for London today. What am I going to do about that bracelet?’

  ‘What I said. She can have it for three thousand pounds. Make her pay—and I will give you two hundred pounds commission—perhaps.’

  I grinned. ‘Cutting me in, eh? You really do like me, don’t you?’ She put her arms round my neck.

  ‘I like you more than you know. You must not be upset that I show my love shamelessly. I am a very direct person. When do I see you again?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She pouted. ‘It must not be too long.’

  ‘I’d join the act—as snake feeder—if I didn’t have to go back to London. Where are you going to be?’

  ‘I am in Cairo next week. Then I go back to Europe. I will give you a list of my bookings for the next month and the name of my
agent in Paris—so you will know how to get in touch with me.’ She smiled. ‘Maybe I will change one of the bookings and get a London date—you’d like that?’

  ‘Very much.’

  ‘Then give me a nice kiss and maybe I will arrange it.’

  She got her kiss and, before I left, I got the list from her. Unshaven, and without breakfast, I walked down to the B.E.A. offices and booked on a flight out after lunch. Then I took a taxi up to the Libya Palace Hotel. I borrowed Olaf s electric razor and joined him and Wilkins for breakfast.

  ‘You will be delighted to hear,’ I told Wilkins, ‘that I am leaving for London after lunch. I have recovered Mrs Stankowski’s bracelet. Her money, I’m afraid, is gone for good. Approve?’

  She dug her spoon into a large grapefruit and looked sceptical. ‘We,’ said Olaf, beginning on the first of five boiled eggs, ‘leave for Cairo tomorrow.’

  ‘I thought you were going today?’

  ‘We have met here a nice man, a countryman of mine—he comes from a town called Kalmar which I know well. He insists on taking us out today to see the Roman remains at Leptis Magna. Already she has seen the Pyramids. Hilda is much interested in such antiquities.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Wilkins.

  ‘Well, I never knew that.’

  ‘There are a lot of things about me you don’t know. For instance, I belong to a poetry society and a jigsaw puzzle club. I collect match-box covers and I don’t care for modern art.’ She jabbed the grapefruit as though she were going over a battlefield bayoneting the doubtful dead.

  ‘You’re in a bad temper too.’

  ‘Naturally,’ said Olaf. ‘She does not trust you.’

  ‘Why ever not?’ I asked, wide-eyed, forcing a little resentment to make it good.

  Olaf grinned and scalped an egg. ‘Because you are a devious man, Mr Carver. I could not say not a good one. But devious. Hilda worries over you. Too much, I think. If she did not worry so much about you she would have married me long ago. I should be angry. Perhaps one day I will be.’