The Spy Who Spoke Porpoise

by Philip Wylie

  “I doubt it. The setup has too many answers.”

  The President meditated aloud. “You want a source of power, high-tension juice, for a month or two—and that has to be managed in secret. So you have to steal it. It’s vital—but for that period only. Right? It could be needed on land—or at sea. Nearby—or miles away—am I still on the beam?” Grove nodded, and he went on. “You aren’t merely charging batteries or the like.” He hesitated and asked, “Nothing visible at sea, that could be suggestive, I suppose?”

  “Nothing that comes from the routine checks; radar; or other Navy and CIA reports. Nothing was reported on the surface in that period which wasn’t supposed to be there, or at least known.”

  “Behind the two islands you spoke of?”

  “Nothing helpful. We had other people look around on Rabbit Island. Red Rock is too low and wet. Relations of Jerry’s did the job. I’d say they were good at it. The seaward side of Rabbit Island has always been used—by assorted scientists, locals going ashore from boats and so on. I am sure Solentor was there, off and on. A submarine could bring men in close and the radar wouldn’t show it up. But not much has been happening there lately. And nothing that would explain the power theft. No sign of electric or any gear brought ashore, that would use as much current.”

  “What about the sea bottom?”

  “All that you can inspect—the shallow part out to the big reef—is apparently unchanged. Be dangerous to lay cable openly, there, anyhow. Too many skin divers and so on. A camouflaged cable, yes—or buried. Beyond the outside reef, though, lies the whole Pacific.”

  The President missed a chip shot. “If I call in the CIA what you’ve told me might leak. We’ve acted on your information and caught a couple of—incredible—traitors. One was an acquaintance of mine. You never know for sure; rather, you can’t always know, what men may do for money—or because of pressure.” The President shrugged off that disillusioning knowledge. “Let’s assume, however, that the other side still has a pipeline into the CIA. So they would likely put an end to whatever is going on in Hawaii—or move it. I want to think this over, Ring. When are you going back?”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Right. I’ll get word on my decision in a few days. I need to talk to certain men, first.” He saw Grove’s disappointment before the signs could be banished. “Look, Ring. I’ll do this for you right away. I’ve already thought of it. Nobody is more aware than I am of what it’s like to carry a great nation on one human back.” His smile was somber. “I have two close friends in Hawaii—men I can trust absolutely. Jake Palmer at Volcanos National Park—he’s a geologist. I’ve known him from boyhood. And Hank Balcom, in command at Kauai—the base where the subs rehearse war. An admiral, now, Hank. I’ll get to them tonight and if you need help they will be set up to give it. Until I decide about the CIA, that is. But don’t go to anybody else, no matter what, till you hear.”

  “Thanks Steve.”

  “If we only have time enough!”

  “That—is why I came direct. It begins to look like time is running out.”

  “I know.” The President made another, remedial chip shot and the game went on.

  The game of golf.

  And the other game.

  12

  Glint

  Grove put a recently rented sedan in the garage. Another morning of cautious search on the raw land and talus beyond the park had been futile. In the week since his return almost nothing new had been found and what was new only showed more clearly how men had gone up and down the pali, dragging heavy gear, at night, until the treasure hunt enabled them to do whatever it was that required daylight. Minute fragments of cable insulation had been scraped off by woody shrubs, recovered and tested by Grove. Traces he had found on patches of sand and among trampled plants meant nothing more about those who had come and gone. Grove’s gauge in the cove gave some of the times. It showed no recent action.

  He’d received notes marked “Personal,” mailed in care of the Abbotts as a precaution, from the President’s two friends, the admiral on Kauai and the geologist on the Big Island. These hand-delivered missives were written in such ways that if they had come under hostile study they would have meant little.

  Grove was invited to visit the research laboratories near the caldera of the Kilauea where a fire pit, Halemaumau, was in irregular but spectacular eruption. With the invitation was a phone number and that letter came, apparently, from another scientist, not Jake Palmer.

  The note from Admiral Henry (Hank) Balcom had been Xeroxed as if it were a form letter sent to many people. It, too, was an invitation—to a charity dinner—and it gave a phone number with word that an RSVP to “Captain Houghton Defton” would be in order. That, Grove assumed, would be a non-existing officer at the base. But a call to that name would be a signal and get him through to the admiral.

  He had replied by sending two picture postcards of hula maidens and a scribbled “Sorry, pal, my trip is too short to allow coming over to see you.” The handwriting on both cards was disguised and the signature was “Steve Forman,” which was not the President’s last name but would suffice as receipts of the two very neatly designed invitations.

  It was comforting to think he—and now Jerry—could call for help if necessary. But it was something less to receive word—by the revised route—that the gallant man in the White House did not want, yet, to bring in the CIA.

  During the golf game Grove had had a shocking idea, and that he could and did try to check immediately on his return.

  Esther Wilson, if that was correct, was perhaps “hidden” now, though after some interval following her first appearance, in the park.

  Grove had taken many lunches in the park restaurant, recently, when he and sometimes Jerry had furtively searched the power-line area. An open-sided restaurant with Polynesia’s thick posts, beams and high roofs, the service, cafeteria style to massive wooden tables of various sizes on two floor levels, it accommodated any possible fraction of the daily crowds wanting lunch or a snack before, after or between shows. This eating place gave a spectacular view of the park and the sea and its near islands. Like the gift shop, it was inside park limits and only paying visitors who wished to break their tour to shop or dine or people with passes were admitted.

  Park executives and many scientists regularly lunched there: the food was excellent. There was a bar. Eight or ten girls served from behind the counters and three more worked as bus “boys”; the barman was male and Japanese. Grove knew these employees quite well—brothers of two of the girls behind the counter belonged to his gang. So he had noticed the new bus girl soon after she’d been hired.

  Her job was to clear tables, remove trays, dispose of food left on paper plates, keep table tops pristine and clear up such inadvertent messes as dropped ice cream cones, infant food spills and the like. She wore the restaurant trademark, a cute, small straw hat. Her muumuu did not conceal her rather unusual width of hip and thickness of buttock or her similarly overdeveloped bosom. She had black hair, a huge mass beneath the absurd hat and a level fringe on her forehead; straight hair. Her eyes slanted slightly and her skin was golden, which, somehow, men called “yellow” long ago. Her profile was not oriental, a common result of Hawaiian racial integration, which is more than superficial.

  Her name was Betty and her last name, when he asked, was Sato. She was as pretty, popular and amiable as the other girls; he’d often chatted with Betty Sato in the days before that game of golf. As he became acquainted with her in that casual way, he’d found himself, now and then, trying to remember a girl he’d known long ago whom Betty seemed to resemble.

  It had not been a very important effort and he’d conducted it mainly because he disliked his habitual forgetfulness and tried to reduce its incidence when he could. The girl’s aura, as he called it, certainly stirred some long-forgotten but sensual nerve. For several days, off and on, his self-questioning had been vain. Then he had abruptly remembered; Betty recalled a French gi
rl he’d once known and loved, he guessed, as much as possible for him. Her name—Grove had to struggle a bit for that, even—had been (and maybe still was, with an added surname) Racquelle Eviant.

  Racquelle was sixteen when her parents furnished Grove with a hide-out under their peasant farmhouse, which was near Lyons. He had used it as his base for five months. He was working with the Maquis in Vichy France, then, and Monsieur et Madame Eviant had taken a great risk to provide Grove that sanctuary. But they had done it gladly. Grove had saved their lives by killing three Nazi SS men who were questioning them, moments before he had made their acquaintance. Later he rescued their youngest son—the other two were dead in lost battles—when the boy had been picked up and was being carted away by collaborator neighbors, for Nazi “interrogation” meaning, of course, slow and hideous death. The Eviants’ traitor neighbors had met a swift fate.

  On the first night Racquelle came quietly into his candlelit snug underground quarters Grove was surprised. It was less than a week after he’d installed himself. He was startled when the trapdoor raised and he saw the girl, vaguely. He thought, as she came down silently and he reset the camouflage beneath the opening, that she must have a message. It was after midnight and he’d been reading to soothe nerves that needed such therapy, sorely. He wore no blouse or undershirt but was still in socks and corduroy trousers.

  “Ah, Racquelle! It’s late! You have a message?” All, in French.

  “Yes, monsieur.” She wore a woolen nightdress and was barefooted. “It is not of trouble. Or even urgent.” She had smiled at him in a way that he’d begun to notice, during the past few days; not a proper way for a maid to smile at any man and, especially, a youngish, lonely and often frightened man who could do with the consolation of any trifle that could divert his mind from … yesterday, and … tomorrow, and all tomorrows there might still be.

  “You’d like some tea? Coffee?” He’d superintended the latest British parachute drop and some kind Briton had added a few luxuries to the arms and explosives that rained in feathery stillness from clouded skies, nearby.

  “No, monsieur.” There was a bed, nothing elegant, a mattress, two down-filled quilts, raised on planks a foot or so—a better bed than most of his people enjoyed at this time. She sat down there and very purposefully removed the soft gown. “I have a private message only. Please come and make love to me.”

  “Jesus!” It was, even then, strong, for Grove. He did not disapprove of profanity but rejected it as limiting and often in poor taste, a bad habit, therefore. He did not object to sixteen-year-old French girls being seduced by his colleagues. He had no such lenient view for himself because he was somewhat more responsible than the others—steadier than the times, indeed, allowed men or even warranted, in these matters. Racquelle was lovely, fully made, dusky of skin, with long, wavy black hair that looked heavy in braids or piled high, as now; she had wonderfully luminous eyes of an amber color and long lashes. Eyes she’d used, with effects he evaded, lately. She began to flush when he sat unmoving at his rude table where the candle stood in steady flame. He was speechless.

  “I am not a virgin,” Racquelle whispered. “The Boches—” She hunched her bare shoulders and covered her breasts. “I am not ill, however, like some. And not with child. It revolts you, that past I have had?”

  The facts seemed irrelevant to Grove. He realized he was dangerously near taking a stride to her side. “You are only sixteen. Your parents, also—what would they—?”

  She spoke after that with softness and a shy certainty. “They did not order me to come to you, because they would fear you might just reject me. I came because I love you, I think, and I know, at least more than enough to—don’t you want me? Cannot you be a little thanked, a little eased from your—work—by a pretty girl?”

  He said it again, slowly, “Jesus.”

  Five months of passion and wonder, of violence, terror, killing and of escaping death by seconds and centimeters. Often, in the later times, he had thought how perfect a wife she would be. If, he would amend, you could settle in the French countryside after surviving this war and be happy never to go anywhere else or see anybody, places or people that would embarrass your wife. She would try to acquire the graces of course. When she found that the great world at the levels Grove knew it was not a wonderland and that its paragons were few, male or female, she’d suffer. His French was Parisian and she tried from the first to imitate it. She was very proud; proud of him, of what she had to give, of the giving, and of his eloquent response.

  But what would he do, where would he go, what would he want, including any wife, if he did live to know peace again? Probably the OSS would have a long task to be completed even if he were able to be part of that; one that wouldn’t make marriage sensible, just a near-perpetual absence. Grove correctly guessed that. And while the OSS wanted him, he was theirs—much as the girl was his, while it was so needed, so wanted and so logical in its fashion.

  When he was sent on a new mission, he had time only to say a little. “I may not return,” he explained.

  The entire Eviant family was present. His mistress, her two younger sisters, the young man he’d snatched from two traitors’ wagon, maman and papa.

  “You must not return, Louis,” Racquelle said steadily. (Lord! He’d not thought of the name for an age!) “For us it is ended. We have loved each other. It would not be right to hope for any loving, again, between us. I shall marry if we are alive at the war’s end. A nice young man. I shall be content. I shall not forget you. Nor will my father, my mother, Jeanne, Yselle or Robert, ever.” The others nodded but could not speak.

  Grove found one word he could manage: “Darling!”

  It was all he did as a farewell. After the armistice he had ascertained that the Eviant family was well and farming thriftily; Racquelle had a beau suitable from every standpoint. One who soon married his love, his near love, one among the very few of the many.

  What to Grove had been “the many” would have caused a fair fraction of men his age no more than condescending smiles. Their collective image hadn’t appeared for many years and until the bus girl at the park reminded him of Racquelle.

  Grove wasn’t a prude. No one reared among circus people can be; a traveling magician, often with a road company as companions, won’t be made more conventional.

  Grove truly liked women, all ages of women, from infant to final hour. He liked people. There was in his manner and the feelings it usually though unconsciously expressed a certain appeal that other men noted and often envied but could not imitate. Physically, even as a younger man, Grove had not been very handsome. But his smile, the specific light in his wide-set, gray eyes, his deep, rolling voice, his self-confidence with the other sex that came from liking females, not their conquest, had impact. Taken with his constant proof of enjoying life and of appreciating, as well as furnishing, imaginative fun, his personality enchanted most females. They called him charming, dear, delightful, because he made them feel safe. He did not just arouse mother or sister feelings, but oftener, a magnetic, unfamiliar urge. Few men really like women as people. That was his basic appeal, perhaps.

  But no one is liked by everybody. Sadistic females didn’t see much in Grove. Masochists instantly knew he wasn’t their type. They are a minority, fortunately, and most of his affairs seemed only that—partly because he could not look back on all of them with pleasure. There was Lisa Birch, for one, his assistant for a long part of his career as a traveling stage magician. Bright, pert, pretty and a devil as intimate partner; he’d considered marrying Lisa to make the lass an honest woman—and as a treasure, too—when he’d found she enjoyed other gentlemen wherever and as often as they became available and Grove’s absence made her fun possible.

  In his OSS days he’d lived with several ladies of a similar occupation and of various nationalities. Most of them took the intimate cover with the assignment husband-wife or even father-daughter. These girls and ladies knew such relations had to be as close
as duty required.

  Grove held nothing against prostitutes, either, a second characteristic rare among men. They were women to him; if they were honest in their terms and attractive, if he was attracted, he treated them as he did all other girls (or women) he liked; the fact that they rented (not “sold”) themselves to live did not lessen his appreciation or alter his feelings.

  However, he had never been able to exploit the appeal to which women responded so often, so warmly and so sure of their safety, as an instrument for professional purposes. He had often managed to charm information out of the lady agents of enemies. But he was unable to do it by erotic pretenses. He literally couldn’t succeed that way. His superiors had soon found that out and passed him over as unfit for assignments that involved female conquest aimed at womanly betrayal.…

  He had been very shocked to realize, on the golf course, that the girl who cleared away trays in the park restaurant was not physically reminiscent of Racquelle but that she brought to mind a lately seen beauty, called Esther Wilson. He had appreciated the President’s tact in not pressing him when he’d made that discovery—if it was one—and had told Steve it was irrelevant.

  On his return to Hawaii he found the expected, quick check did not answer. This Betty Sato might possibly be the lady Solentor had left him, without clothes and for the grim purpose she’d stated. But pretty Betty’s eyes were black. Their color and slant could be managed—contact lenses and make-up. But as he made a point of chatting with her, it became difficult to believe Betty had so perfectly learned her Hawaiian “accent,” that odd mix of accents which most of the counter girls had lost.

  In the days he now spent trying to find useful evidence on the mountain toward Makapuu Point, in the spring sun’s heat, slaving to remain invisible, growing less and less hopeful and always weary from those efforts, he kept changing his mind. Cyrus Ah Soo had said Esther was on another island—and perhaps she had been. Jerry, obliquely questioned, evidently assumed Cy’s claim was still correct. Betty was fat. She had no more hesitation than the other girls about talking with him, at some length, and with the customary small jokes. Standing close, too.