‘And now I think we’ll go into dinner,’ said Gerastan, while I was still reeling from his justifiable denigration of my capabilities.
The first part of dinner was taken up with the business of eating. I’m sure that the food was magnificent, but to me everything tasted like sawdust. Touchfeather, I thought, you’re in very deep water, and there just ain’t anyone who is going to throw you a life jacket. I looked around the table. Bill and Marvin were just plain miserable. The Eunuch was shovelling the food into his mouth, obviously tasting nothing and just performing a biological necessity. Only Gerastan seemed to be enjoying himself. It may have been an act, but I doubted it. He commented on the wine. He complained mildly that the entrée could have done with another forty-five seconds in the oven; and he sent the coffee back because he said it had been standing too long before we reached it. Apart from that he managed a line of small talk which was endless, but which didn’t say a thing. He waited until he had sampled the brandy before he got down to business.
‘Tell us about yourself, Katherine, and the people you work for.’
‘United?’
‘No, my dear. Nor Air India, or BOAC, or any other airline. The people you really work for, the people who employ Signor Bertelli in Rome and Walter Martin in New York.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said with remarkable lack of invention.
‘I didn’t suppose you would straightaway,’ said Gerastan. ‘Still, we have plenty of time.’ I saw Bill and Marvin both glance at him quickly, but he didn’t even acknowledge their looks of enquiry. Instead he addressed himself to the Eunuch.
‘Hamid, we must talk,’ he said. Then he turned to Bill. ‘William, take Katherine back to her room. Don’t bother retiring, Katherine. The night has only just started.’ Then almost as an afterthought he turned to Marvin. ‘Is your plane ready?’
‘I think so.’
‘I shall want you to return to Los Angeles later.’ He stood up and turned to me. ‘I have some business to attend to. It will take me exactly one hour. Please use that time to consider your position here. Afterwards I shall ask you the same question again, along with many others.’ He bowed slightly, and he and the Eunuch walked out, leaving me with Bill and Marvin. There was a long moment of silence broken by Bill, who turned to Marvin suddenly.
‘You bloody fool,’ he said savagely. ‘Why did you bring her here?’
I answered for him. ‘I asked him to,’ I said. ‘Not that it would have made any difference, eh, Marvin?’
Marvin shook his head. ‘If she hadn’t asked, I was to bring her here anyway,’ he said. ‘Those were Roger’s orders.’
Bill looked at him for a further moment, then got to his feet. ‘Come on, Katy,’ he said. Marvin started to say something else; then he changed his mind. I stood up.
‘You’re a bright pair, aren’t you?’ I said. ‘The master says jump and you both react as though he had put a rocket up your backsides. Marvin I can understand, even if I can’t condone. But you, Bill, what’s the matter with you?’ He glanced towards Marvin as though for help, but he was going to get no assistance from that one. Then he turned back to me.
‘Come on, Katy,’ he said.
He tried to take my arm, but I shrugged his hand away and walked ahead of him. My grand exit was a little spoiled outside the door due to the fact that I didn’t know whether to turn left or right. Bill steered me correctly without attempting to take my arm again, and three minutes later we were back in the blue sitting room.
During that three minutes I had done some fast thinking. He headed for the bar as soon as we entered the room, while I sat down and wondered how I could make my move without appearing too obvious. But I only had an hour, so I couldn’t afford to hang about too long.
‘Bring me a drink, please, Bill,’ I said. He poured me one and fetched it over.
‘You don’t understand Roger Gerastan,’ he said, still looking for his own justification.
‘Explain him to me,’ I said, deciding to sacrifice five minutes if it would help me understand things better.
‘You think he’s some sort of a traitor, a man who sells stuff to the other side. Well, he doesn’t. He gives it to them.’ The idea was so ludicrous that I nearly burst out laughing. But I didn’t.
‘Roger maintains, and I agree with him, that the only way to prevent the world from destroying itself is to keep an even balance of power. If one side gets too far ahead, they have no need to fear the other any longer; they can do what they like. This can only lead to the Holocaust.’
‘And Gerastan gives away his country’s secrets to keep this balance. Is that what you’re saying?’
‘It works both ways. Hamid feels the same. If either East or West gets too far ahead, then these two men try to even it out. As long as one nation is as powerful as the other, there can be no war. It’s as simple as that.’
Nothing could be that simple—except perhaps Bill for believing it. But believe it he obviously did; it was too daft for him to have made it up. Obviously the academic life had addled his brain.
’So you should be grateful to men like Roger Gerastan. He risks his name, his reputation, even his life to maintain a spot of sanity amid the insanity that threatens to explode all around us.’
‘Yes, Bill,’ I said, and emptied my drink over my lap. I jumped to my feet and he started to make clumsy efforts to mop me down.
‘Just a minute,’ I said. ‘I’ll change.’ I went into the dressing room and stripped down quickly. Then I started to rummage in the closets. I had no scruples about what I was going to do; neither did I have any false hopes as to its efficacy. But I couldn’t think of anything else. I had to get Bill into bed and there point out the folly of his ways; there’s not much point in carrying the equipment I do if I’m not prepared to use it when the time is ripe, and I couldn’t remember one riper. Bra, I thought, in case the sight of my scar turned him off before he started, but flimsy bra so that he could see the treasures that lay buried beneath. Is he a black-stocking-and-suspender man? I wondered, then quickly decided that they all were. So on they went—and a pair of pants on top, in case he thought I was throwing it all at him too hard. There was a flimsy negligée which allowed everything to show through and, thus armed to the teeth, I galloped back into the fray.
I started by appealing to his better nature, which got him across the room and onto the settee beside me. Then, involuntarily, I placed my hand over his, emphasising a point I was trying to make, and two minutes later he covered my hand with his other. Eyes widening a bit, I reminded him of what we had meant to each other and how I had felt when he disappeared from my life. I even managed to squeeze out a tear, and that provided the catalyst. In a moment I was sobbing my heart out on his chest and he was ‘there there-ing’ me all over the place. One thing led to another, and five minutes later one of my breasts had found its way into his hand, and a moment later into his mouth. Then, with thirty-five minutes still left of my hour, he was carrying me into the bedroom. I discovered there that he wasn’t all that much of a stockings-and-suspenders man after all. He had them off me in thirty seconds flat.
I’ve always maintained that one should grab one’s pleasures when and where you can and, having satisfied my conscience in the matter, I went on to enjoy myself. I mean, there was no telling; it might be the last time, and it would have been hypocritical of me to fight against the physical enjoyment. Apart from that, no girl can fake an orgasm like the real thing, and Bill knew from experience the way I reached my climax. So I let nature take its course, and, five minutes later, I was gasping his name and chewing my lower lip to a frazzle. It was a repetition of that first time in Bombay. The only concession I made to the occasion was that I pulled myself together a lot quicker than I would have done normally. I’m a girl who likes to unwind slowly. There aren’t all that many men who can give you a decent, first-class, deluxe trip, and when I’ve got one, I try to make up for all the wasted times, when I’ve started out and
never quite made it. But this time I sorted myself out almost as soon as it was over, leaving him hanging way behind.
‘Oh, Bill, that was wonderful. God, you’re marvellous!’ And having given his vanity a boost, I started down to serious work. ‘What are we going to do, darling?’
‘I don’t know, Katy. I really don’t know.’
‘You’ll think of something,’ I said, doubting it. He chewed on this for a few moments.
‘If only you could see how right Roger is,’ he said finally. ‘What he’s doing, he’s doing for all of us.’
‘Even if I did, would he accept it?’ I said. ‘He thinks I’m all sorts of a Mata Hari.’
‘Not without cause,’ he said gently.
‘People can change their ideas as well as their allegiances,’ I said.
’You really mean it, don’t you, Katy?’ I assured him that I meant it, but would Gerastan believe me?
‘You could be an enormous help to our cause,’ he said.
My God! It was a ‘cause’ now, with Roger Gerastan mounted on a snow-white charger and bearing a strange device, the keeper of the world’s peace while he got fat in the process. And it was only at that moment that I suddenly realised what his motives were. What had Mr. Blaser said? America had cut back her missile-development programme because she was so far ahead of the Russians; then, because the sides had drawn level again, Uncle Sam had opened up his bottomless purse, shovelling money at the Gerastan Corporation like there was no tomorrow. Fifty, a hundred, a thousand million—you name it, Mr. Gerastan, sir; we’ll just sign the cheques. Just so long as we can draw ahead again. But not too far ahead, says Mr. Gerastan, or the purse strings will be pulled shut again. And if a man like Bill comes up with something to upset the balance, then for God’s sake let the other side get it as well and, what is more important, be seen to get it. As for friend Eunuch, he was no more an agent working in Russia than Mr. Blaser. Because this trade was strictly one way, from West to East. If Russia managed to draw ahead by her own effort, then the effect for Gerastan would be the same, the bottomless purse again. It was just that the Comrades couldn’t always be relied upon to do it on their own, so Gerastan gave them a boost every now and then. The Eunuch was just a high-powered, international hatchet man, nothing more. And Roger Gerastan was a money-grubbing maniac who didn’t mind using treason as a means of getting fat.
It must have been a pretty sweet setup: a couple of Government auditors on the payroll and he could milk as much as forty percent out of what the Government was paying him. Research and development is a notoriously difficult thing to budget for and, added to this, there were the fifteen-odd factories around the country turning out machinery that was designed to be obsolete before it ever got off the production line. And forty percent of figures with eight noughts at the end added up to a great deal of loot in anyone’s language. As long as he had people like Bill to come up with fresh gizmos every now and then, and Uncle Sam didn’t run out of money, it could go on forever.
But there would be no point in trying to explain my newfound theory to Bill. If he hadn’t caught on by now, he wasn’t going to. He was blinded by the reflected glory of Gerastan’s great peace motives. It was going to take more than a quick fuck to get him to change his ideas.
‘I don’t think Mr. Gerastan will trust me, whatever you tell him,’ I said, cuddling close. He was obviously thinking the same thing, because he didn’t answer right away, and when he did, it wasn’t to give me an argument.
‘If there was some way for you to prove to him that you’re on his side,’ he said finally.
‘Like what?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. Tell him what he wants to know about the people you work for. That would help.’ It would help me get hung, drawn and quartered if ever I got out of this, but I doubted that Roger Gerastan would be very impressed, whatever I told him. If I could have cut Mr. Blaser’s throat in the middle of Oxford Street at high noon, I think I could have won Gerastan over, but I didn’t see doing it with much less. But now I had to convince Bill of this, at the same time keeping him sufficiently hung on me to go along with my next suggestion. To state it baldly, this was to get me the hell out of there before Gerastan set the Eunuch onto me. I rated my chances at double zero with the hairless horror. Just looking at him was the equivalent of someone else using thumbscrews.
‘I’ve got to get away from here,’ I said. ‘It’s the only way.’ Bill had his face tucked into the angle made by my shoulder and neck. He removed it to grunt something unintelligible and then he went back to his nuzzling. ‘Then when I don’t do anything, he’ll know that I go along with his ideas.’ It sounded pretty lame, and simple as Bill might be, he wasn’t that simple. He removed his face once more.
‘He’d send someone after you,’ he said. ‘He’d have you killed.’
‘I think he might do that anyway,’ I said, trying to get his two feet on the ground.
‘Not while I’m around,’ he said. ‘He wouldn’t dare.’ Dear, brave Bill. He didn’t realise it, but he’d probably cut my throat himself if Gerastan ordered it.
‘So what is he going to do with me?’
‘Nothing, so long as you tell him what he wants to know. And don’t try to lie to him, Katy. He’s too bright.’
‘Even if I tell him what he wants to know, he can’t very well let me go afterwards if he doesn’t trust me.’
‘You’ll come with me,’ said Bill.
‘Where? You’re supposed to be dead.’
‘A place he’s got in the Eastern Mediterranean. We’ll stay there until this whole insanity has sorted itself out and Roger can come out into the open.’
That’ll be the day, I thought. Bill didn’t realise it, but he was as dead now as he would be when they lowered him six feet under.
‘All right, Bill,’ I said. ‘I place myself in your hands entirely.’
It was what he wanted to hear, probably what he had been sent to my room for, and I heard him breathe a sigh of relief. Then, to seal our pact as it were, he started to make love to me again. I went along with it for a few minutes. I was just beginning to enjoy it again when he rolled over on top of me. It was now or never. I wrapped my legs around his neck, and before he realised that I wasn’t motivated by passion, I’d nearly throttled him. I rolled out from under and in two minutes I’d tied him with half a dozen elegant-looking belts I found in the dressing room. I stuffed a silk scarf into his mouth and tied it with a sexy little suspender belt. I made sure he could breathe and, although he hadn’t yet regained consciousness, I planted a kiss on his forehead for old time’s sake. Then I scrambled myself into a pair of slacks and a shirt and pulled on my boots.
SIXTEEN
The tinted glass of the bedroom windows gave a beautiful blue sheen to the moonlit grounds, but that was all it gave. The glass was an inch thick and unbreakable. And it was set into metal frames. Air-conditioning gave all the fresh air that the blue-room guests could require and, unless one happened to have a stick of dynamite handy, these windows just weren’t for opening. So it had to be another way.
They must have assumed that I would be safe in Bill’s care because there was no one outside my bedroom door. Turn right along the passage, through one of the large rooms, another passage, into the room I had seen on first entering the house, and there was the front door. If memory served, there would be two cowboys propping up the pillars just outside, so I gave the door a miss, crossed the room and ran down another passage, trying to keep an outside wall with me all the time. A right angle in the passage and another window letting onto the gardens. But it was the same sort of window as the one in my bedroom and I still had no dynamite with me. I tried to remember the house as it had looked from outside and whether there were any other doors. But to the best of my recollection everything was built facing inwards and, apart from these stupid immovable windows, nothing faced out onto the grounds. So, cowboys or no cowboys, I was going to have to use the front door.
I backtracke
d along the passage, gathering an Indian memento in the form of a club en route. Then, feeling like Geronimo about to make his last stand, I opened the front door and stepped outside. I was only half right: there was one cowboy propping up the house, not two. It was Wild Bill from that afternoon. He’d obviously been chewed off a strip for allowing me to make an idiot of him, and he wasn’t at all pleased to see me.
‘Good evening,’ I said, both hands behind my back.
‘Where are you going?’ he asked.
‘For a walk.’
‘Nobody told me nothing about that,’ he said. He turned and reached into a recess for the house phone. I hit him hard enough to lay him out, but not hard enough to kill him. At least, I didn’t think so, but they were pretty crafty those Indians, and perhaps the club was better balanced and more deadly than it seemed. Anyway, I wasn’t going to wait around to find out and, as he slid quietly to the ground, I relieved him of his gun. Five seconds later I was out through the archway and into the grounds. The two dogs chained in the courtyard hadn’t even given me a second look; apparently they only chomped and slavered when they were off their leashes. So there I was, trotting down the drive, keeping to the cover of the bushes and shrubs that bordered it, and I still had five minutes before my hour was up.
The garden smelled enchanting and the thin moon gave me just sufficient light so that I didn’t trip over anything and fall flat on my face. But what had seemed a short distance in the car that morning was a hell of a lot further on foot, so I had plenty of time to plan the strategy I was going to employ when I reached the gates. Unfortunately time was all I did have, because as I stopped behind a tree and looked at the gates twenty-five feet in front of me, I still had no idea how I was going to get through. There was a small lodge just inside the gates; the door was open and there were two men half in and half out of the place. They were talking quietly and one of them had his left boot off and was sitting on the ground, massaging his foot. I could see a small table inside the lodge and, on the table, the house phone. Two men weren’t going to be as easy as one, even taking into account the fact that I now carried an equaliser. I could hardly go banging it off all over the place. I still had a fair way to go, and I didn’t want to travel it in front of a pack of bloodthirsty hounds.
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