The Spy Who Spoke Porpoise

by Philip Wylie

  Jerry nodded. He’d been half attentive at the last. “It will not be difficult,” he said finally, “to take her off your hands.”

  “No?”

  “My second cousin would be best, I think. Cy—Cyrus Ah Soo is resourceful. He owes me some favors. And a thousand bucks, too. He has property—interests—here and there. I’ll ring Cy.” The watchman rose to cross to the lighted phone booth. “You will meet him at your house in, say, half an hour?”

  “Rather not, I think. On the thin chance that our friend the fat Soviet horror still has a watch or has set one up, by now. I’d think it would be better, at least more puzzling, if the girl was taken away by an unidentified person. Will this—Ah Soo—be able to manage that?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Then, can he come here—discreetly—and get the keys? I’ll tell him where I hid the handcuff set. And she’ll need some sort of clothes. Five-six tall, about, and well proportioned.”

  Jerry nodded.

  He was in the booth for five minutes. When he came back he said, “All set.” Then he gazed at Grove with a beginning grin. “You’ll have to tell the—President—that I have joined his Special Forces?”

  “Yes.”

  The grin grew. It became laughter. “You are the damnedest man I ever knew!”

  The response was serious. “We may both be damned, now.”

  Jerry cut the laugh. “But we shall try to prevent that. And two are better than one.”

  “Actually,” Grove reminded him quietly, “we are four.”

  “Yes. And one in a tree and the other in the White House. I feel I’m dreaming. And know I am not. I thought the good days for me had ended. And suddenly, bingo! the best ones!”

  “That’s what they sure should be,” Grove replied, “or else.” Wearily, he rubbed his face. “Since you’re in, I need to know about your experience, your training. I mean, I don’t want to call on you for something that wasn’t part of your drill.”

  Jerry began, then.

  By and by Mr. Cyrus Ah Soo appeared, six feet two inches of muscle, aplomb and quick perception but few words. When he’d gone, Jerry continued. At the end he said, “I’ve probably left out a few things. However—”

  “—however,” Grove chuckled tiredly, “you have quite a nasty repertoire. You could teach me a couple of tricks.” He stood and swayed. “Gotta get some sleep.”

  “I could arrange to have other—cousins—keep a watch of your home—”

  Grove shook his head. “I’ll be okay. It would be wrong and I’ve made more than my quota of blunders for one night.”

  “Me too,” Jerry said, and sat for a while as he watched Grove walk into the night. Soon he whispered an expletive in Chinese. No good. He tried Hawaiian. Unsatisfactory. He turned to USA-barracks and it was an improvement.

  But nothing was adequate to express his amazement and elation.

  The station wagon left the park and Jerry resumed his patrol, realizing he would need an alibi for rounds unmade and unrecorded: teen-age kids, he thought, who’d sneaked into the area and been caught and given a long, documented and very alarming lecture. That would appeal to his park superiors. As he rode on, Jerry was happiest over the fact that he had held back on reporting what he had found out about R. K. Grove. Somehow, he felt, he had practically known it would be a mistake to turn in his friend without proof of his menace.

  Grove drove the short way home in an opposite state of mind. Why in the devil hadn’t he trusted his instinct and just put it straight to the big Hawaiian-Chinese? What he’d done had been disloyal, ugly, and ridiculous, too, by sheer chance. As he garaged the station wagon and after the automatic door closed he was able to smile a little. Jerry would understand, after all. For Jerry was a professional and would know you cannot trust anybody, in certain situations.

  The room occupied by the girl was empty. Grove tried to remove every trace of her presence—because of Jenny. As he did that, he realized no perfume lingered. He’d noticed none when he was closest to her. That tended to support her narrative: perfume wouldn’t be wasted by Solentor on a woman meant for slow dying, in Grove’s presence.

  He went to bed and lay awake, wondering about Project Neptune. It was real and it was huge; but it was still unguessable.

  It would be, for a long string of days and nights.

  10

  Tumult

  Alfred and Albert Scopes were twins. Eleven years old, they were inquisitive, bold, attractive kids, wiry and freckled, redheaded, with projecting ears. Skinny, but far from feeble, reared in a suburb of Omaha, Alfred and Albert were, that humid midday, visiting Sea Life Park (and Hawaii) for the first time. They sat in the Science Theater and were dazzled by the acts of trained porpoises. They agreed, covertly, the young lady who announced the show should grace Playboy magazine—which they often examined after their elder brother Carl had finished with it. Examined away from the house, for safety and thus revealing a certain precocity, mental and physical.

  The Scopes family left the theater, a little wet from splashes made by impish performers in the tank, perhaps on purpose. Elwin Deeter Scopes and his wife decided to look around in the gift shop and gave the twins funds for food purchase at the nearby restaurant. It was a blunder.

  Albert and Alfred lingered briefly in the Sea Chest, bothering adults by merely being in the way. But when that area and its potential dwindled, they were glum.

  “Mom,” Albert said with disgust, “is looking at dress goods. Tapa cloth!” They’d already visited the Polynesian Village and knew even how tapa cloth was made.

  Alfred followed his twin brother’s next glance and saw what their old man was doing: examining paintings and prints, in a different room. Mrs. Bessie Scopes was an indefatigable dress material shopper. Her spouse, an Amherst graduate and a CPA, was an amateur painter and an obsessive gallery-goer.

  The twins left. With fast-melting ice cream cones they meandered through crowds, idly scrutinized boobies and turtles and so, by chance, came within sight of a gate bearing a sign: Authorized Personnel Only.

  Naturally, they went through—and came out on a paved road. Beyond were more buildings, several tanks with animals splashing, office buildings and other, obviously off-limits, constructions. Proceeding into the area, they passed cubicles where men were just sitting, or writing, or dictating, and a very complicated affair of tanks, underwater viewports in a two-story edifice that was locked.

  Albert therefore turned his attention to unexplored regions—which included the gigantic talus slope and the massive, lofty cliffs that stood above, like steps of a giant’s fort: other-planetary, in effect.

  Nobody had stopped them or even, much, looked them over. Children of scientists and employees often wandered here while waiting to be driven home. In every research facility personnel changes produce wandering-kids changes. The twins had long since learned, moreover, that if you want to go someplace where you’re not allowed the way to do it is casually, conspicuously, without haste and with the manner of authorized personnel.

  For a while, then, the boys simply gazed at vertical rises of the pali and the frozen rock maze below it. Albert started the next effort by saying, “Boy!”

  “Some rocks!” Alfred agreed. “Let’s see if—a fence.”

  There was no fence here. The invaded area was out of bounds for the park’s masses. And even those farsighted experts who had planned this vast, varied and growing complex hadn’t thought of climbing boys, escaped from the park and parental contact, scrambling among the great stone shambles—sweaty, thorn-harried but game. Kids and adults, now and then, in other but identical areas of steep slope, green tangle and cliff, tried them; much of Hawaii offers even loftier and equally boy-provocative challenges, all hazardous.

  When Albert-Alfred emerged above the green, flat tops of the tree fringe they scrambled onto a big polyhedron of stone, to rest. The view of the sea was tremendous and the islands made a spectacular, added attraction: the sea hues were ideal for a million
home movie recordings—and endless sittings of friends, viewing “our trip to Hawaii.”

  Scenery is of limited interest to boys, however dramatic. After they got their wind back, they considered, silently, the possible advantage of moving up—where the rocks became smaller and lay at a patently precarious angle of repose. They decided not.

  Their discovery was made coming down, and coming by a slightly different route that seemed easier. The twins saw the object simultaneously: a drift of air carried it to the spot they were intending to reach by a pants-slide.

  “Money!” they yelled.

  It was. It was a single bill and its denomination was One Hundred Dollars, United States of America.

  When they’d retrieved it they looked deeply into one another’s eyes and said, in chorus, “We both saw it first.” There was a silence. Another duet. “It’s probably counterfeit.” They looked toward the park. Albert said what Alfred was about to: “Dad’ll know.”

  Their return to the Sea Chest—and to parents on the verge of rebuke—changed in tone when the bill was handed to the father.

  “Where the hell—”

  The ensuing palaver was heated and it was also overheard by sundry park visitors. Mr. Scopes, followed by spouse and led by dancing sons, ultimately went to the park offices and reported the find to Roy Hedges, who smiled, listened, frowned unaggressively and couldn’t exactly figure out what to do.

  A sort of escrow was finally contrived. Roy put the bank note in the safe, signed a receipt and smiled some more. Since the twins hadn’t expected to possess the fortune, even if it wasn’t counterfeit, the situation was satisfactory. They had found a hundred-dollar bill which, if unclaimed, would eventually revert to the Scopes family. Terrific!

  Terrific—and a tale now shared by several secretaries, clerks, submanagers and such. Of them, two considered another foray—something that had not occurred to their boss, the sterling Roy Hedges.

  These two, at 5:01 P.M. left the offices and took clandestine routes to the site, as near as they’d gathered it. Hepzibah Hiayama drove as if toward her home in Kailua and cut back on the temporary road that served the contractor’s men now recommencing work on the Makai Range. Parking before she reached the institute grounds, the eighteen-year-old former Miss Pineapple made her way, with hardship, to a point much higher up the slope than that of the rich strike. Below her, silently, and to her left, Ahalamano Jones, a porpoise-training candidate who’d happened to be in the business building at the critical time, slithered through the tumbled boulders like a mouse in a rubble of cement blocks.

  He found nothing until, as the twilight lost all muscle, he heard Hepzibah approach and saw both her expression … and her closed fist. He had no intention of doing more than asking. But that wasn’t necessary. The charming girl said, unsteadily, “You scared me! Look! Could they possibly be real?”

  She handed him two segments of a gold-colored bracelet with, in each, a very large, very green, very intricately cut … something. The gold didn’t look like brass. A decent person, “Haha” Jones shrugged. But his eyes had a glitter that did not relate to the girl, however well she deserved it. Her subsequent near snatch of the fragments and hasty, bruising retreat downward were not really hysterical; merely conservative.

  Before dinner, the Hiayama family, relatives and neighbors had heard enough to imagine that a fortune in money and gems lay scattered on the fallen part of the pali, there for the taking. A bill, of whatever sort, could have blown to the feet of the Scopes twins from any place; the park was on the windward side of Oahu, the side where the mountains diverted the trades and cooled their clouds into rain that fluted the precipices. On that side of the island, wind could carry more than bills for trips of circuitous and theoretically endless lengths.

  The story of Hepzibah’s find attracted another hearer, a local jeweler and member of the same church. He brought his loop, made a production of his scrutiny and announced, correctly, that the fragment was part of a gold bracelet and the stones, not emeralds, but so what? They were tourmalines: perfect, clear, worth maybe nearly a thousand dollars apiece.

  Haha Jones tried to keep his next intentions to himself. Unfortunately, he had two younger brothers, a quarter British, a quarter Spanish, and the same amounts part Hawaiian and part uncertain, who were very much like the Scopes twins. They followed him after supper on their bikes and watched him start sneaking up into the rocks, with two flashlights. Then they went home, to find the Hepzibah tale had reached there—with embellishments. It was being said “millions in money, gold and jewels” littered the pali behind the part-institute area—apparently cast away by robbers in desperate flight.

  One variation said that. There were, by 10 P.M., hundreds of other variations.

  When Jerry reported for duty he was worried. The man he relieved told him the cause for the winking lights above the parked cars piling up on Kalanianaole Highway. Jerry made his rounds, watchful of the firefly swarm. It expanded and contracted, moiled slowly and put out pseudopodia. It wasn’t his territory. Patrol cars were busy, keeping the Kalan open and getting stuck cars out of ditches. They tried to stop would-be climbers. Chains blocked all park entrances now; otherwise it would have been loaded with vehicles.

  By two in the morning most of the seekers had given up and gone home. However, a skinny, dark girl with bangs and bright eyes saw a twinkle as she trekked down with her exhausted mother and picked up a golden brooch which was somewhat smashed but held nineteen pearls still.

  The girl, Nomaua Dibble, was to appear the next week in an eighth-grade play. Her mother, a spouse-abandoned but deserving woman, was devoted to the “Insomniacs Club,” a radio program that began at midnight on Station WWHH under the masterly direction of Mr. Hack Davis.

  She got through to Hack Davis after long effort, since his switchboard was unusually lighted that night—or morning. Hack listened and his hardier listeners listened too. He had been skeptical at first of tales of “pirate treasure” on the pali near the park.

  That view was modified when one of the tourists who had heard the Scopeses’ first astonishment and had seen the bill phoned in that much confirmation.

  Some of the peripheral recipients of Hepzibah’s story then reconfirmed the lurid picture. The result became as certain as the then imminent sunrise. Before its manifestation, however, there was another happening.

  Ever since the watchman had listened to Ring Grove’s reason for coming to Hawaii, Jerry had been extraordinarily alert. Twice more, somebody had slipped into the park and remained for a long time, undiscovered and doing nothing he could hear or see or find a trace of. But Jerry and Grove were aware of the time of each entry and exit.

  Jerry’s mind was ready to accept anything novel though not, he had often thought, as novel as some things Ring Grove could produce—and suspect or look for. The finding of the hundred-dollar bill and the parts of a bracelet with the subsequent night’s scramble of people greedy enough to take the chance was something new. And as he made his rounds Jerry watched the twinkling searchers and listened to the shouts of police and the roar of cars on the Kalan. It seemed to him he knew something else that might bear on this singular, insane business.

  When it came to mind, which was about when the last searchers quit, it came hard. Three nights before, while he’d been cycling the park, he’d thought he saw a light on the summit of the escarpment above the institute. It had not lasted long enough to be surely identified and he had waited in vain for a repeat, dismissing it in the end as a freak reflection of car headlights turning on some curve of a side road, on the other flank of the pali. He had also thought, and he now believed it had not been much afterward, that he’d heard a frail, high scream from the same general direction. But he’d decided it was a wakened gull, or a similar bird, many of which gave out just such sounds.

  He now and abruptly realized that if he had seen a light which originated on the summit and heard not a bird but a human voice, it might explain what had been found on
the talus. A human being, hurled from the ragged skyline, would probably scream; if female, she would possibly be wearing a bracelet and her pocketbook might be thrown after her to erase all trace of the point of her dispatch. In any case, she’d lose it if it went with her and it certainly would burst open and might contain a bill of that high denomination.

  The idea set him on the task of calculating the point where he had half seen the light and, as dawn made that possible, of trying to determine how such a hypothesized body would fall, and where it might come to rest. He could narrow the first problem to a matter of a hundred feet. The second, as light enough allowed him to study it, was more difficult. A human being, merely pushed from the summit, would come down a long way, hitting the narrow treads of what resembled a giant staircase and rolling off. Most of them were debris-heaped and sloped on that account. The victim, whether shoved or flung, would almost surely tumble to the talus slope itself, where momentum might carry it some added distance. Possibly, it might stop on one of the few setbacks that were fairly free of fallen rubble, wide, and level enough, to hold it.

  With glasses, he began a search, moving about in the grounds for varied angles. It seemed to him that six or seven shelves in the many might stop such a coursing body. But if the theoretical victim were flung, by two men of moderate strength, the body would almost certainly clear the first half dozen setbacks and gain speed enough to bounce from the rims of those below.

  With improving light, he searched such places but he could see no sign of a body. No wind-whipped garment showed—no splash of blood gone dark brown, and no other indication that gave substance to his hunch. He wondered what to do. He hated to waken Grove at this hour and he could not leave his post.

  He was biking through the institute parking yard, still glancing upward now and then, when he decided to have a look at the slope above and behind the first cottage built there for scientific personnel with wives. It was actually bedded in the biggest rocks at the base of the steep slope. The flash of light had been somewhere above that first attractive mini-house—almost a thousand feet below. Kiawe-trees, bushes and a multitude of different weeds covered the first hundred feet behind the cottage. But once clear of the vegetation, he knew he could look around an extensive region and, at the same time, keep his patrol area in view, pretty much.