Goddesses Never Die

by George B Mair

  She scratched her ribs for a brief moment and then flung herself against him. ‘Kiss me, David. I can tell a lot about a man from the way he kisses.’ And as he almost automatically took her into his arms she caressed his cheek with a rabbit kiss which proved the warmth of her lips.

  And then Grant revolted. He could see only a man blasted to death by the girl who clung to him, and he could remember only her bluff and broken promise, but she sensed his mood as he stiffened, and she eyed him with cynical speculation. ‘Not good enough for you, David?’

  He stubbed out his cigarette, stepped back a pace and unbuttoned his shirt. ‘I’m having a bath.’

  ‘Or maybe you’re tired.’ Her voice was neutral.

  He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘I want a bath too.’

  He pulled out a coin. ‘Then I’ll toss you.’

  She eyed him curiously. ‘Doesn’t look like it, right now.’

  The coin flashed in the air. ‘Head you go first.’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m a tail woman myself.’

  The coin flipped on to the carpet head up and Grant glanced at her sourly. ‘Then you lose. I bathe.’

  ‘David.’ There was a note of urgency which tingled his senses. ‘You don’t want to scrub my back? You figure on doing a solo turn?’

  He nodded briefly, walked towards the bath and flipped off the taps. She was blocking the door as he turned to sneck it closed and her eyes were sparking fire. ‘There’s room for two,’ she said quietly.

  ‘But I aim to be alone.’ Grant was exasperated. The girl infuriated him. Her self-possession and tacit assumption that whatever she might say would automatically go riled him and he felt himself brace for trouble. ‘Move,’ he snapped. ‘This at least is my party.’

  She flashed into action with a violence which took him off guard as her toes shot up his thigh and landed with an agonising thwack in his crutch while her hands darted a swift left right to his cheeks and left them smarting. ‘I’m coming too,’ she panted.

  He moved back in the same second, flung the door open as she leaned against it and caught her as she catapulted forward. His arms encircled her buttocks and as he tucked her under his arm her legs beat like flails while a non-stop stream of abuse whispered into the room. Though even then, Grant noted, she was avoiding a scene. This would remain a private party, and he unceremoniously dumped her on to the bed, turned her over and smacked her buttocks, half seriously, half as a gesture to behave. And then she slithered to the floor, dived back towards the bath and was stopped only at the last moment by a rugger tackle which threw her forwards, and ended with Grant lying on top of her on the parquet. He seized her by both ankles, pulled her back towards the bed, forced her to lean over the edge and slapped her rear with enough sting to hurt. ‘But next time,’ he added softly, ‘you’ll really feel it. So be careful.’

  Her cheeks were flushed crimson and her eyes still sparking fire when she suddenly flashed a left-right towards his head. Her fingers were curved, and her long nails gleamed like claws as they flickered against the light. He leaned backwards, out of range, wrapped her in the eiderdown and then thrust her body in a struggling bundle below the blankets while he knelt astride her and fixed her chin in his hands. ‘Wild cat!’

  She stared at him suspiciously. ‘Pretty wild yourself, weren’t you?’

  His weight was keeping her motionless, but he was momentarily taken off guard when she suddenly smiled, and as his grip on her chin relaxed she twisted deftly and bit him on the wrist. Her body flexed in the same second, and as he gasped with pain the bundle below him seemed to explode, her arms darted from beneath the coverings and she aimed a chop towards the side of his neck. Grant didn’t hesitate. His left hand pulled a pillow across her face while he fixed her with a vine grip which froze her into instant immobility. And then he gave her room to breathe. The pillow was allowed to drop sideways and he saw that she was eyeing him with a new respect. His left hand fumbled for a moment until he had her anchored by both wrists while he unexpectedly relaxed his hold, slid out of bed and jerked her towards him. Her feet were still entangled in the sheet, and the sight of it gave him an idea. Before she could figure his intention he had smacked her lightly on the stomach, and when she reflexly drew up her thighs he dropped her to the floor, wrapped her in a bundle inside the sheet and tied the corners together while one knee pressed firmly against her back anchored her in a position of maximal flexion. Her arms were still beating wildly against the linen when he rounded off by lifting her bodily across the room and dumping her inside the vast wardrobe. He then locked the door and smiled slightly at her stream of invective. She could fight better than most women, and Grant guessed that he had been fortunate. Meanwhile he would bathe, and when he released her he calculated that she would be more tractable.

  He was stepping into the water when Lu knocked on the bedroom door, opened it without pause and entered carrying a tray laden with chicken sandwiches, cheese cubes, dry biscuits and a samovar. Grant hastily threw on a dressing gown. ‘That was a quick fifteen minutes, Lu.’

  The Mongol stared at him curiously. ‘A Chinese proverb teaches that happiness makes the sun move faster.’ He looked at the upheaved bedclothes. ‘Possibly you were very happy.’

  ‘Possibly,’ said Grant dryly.

  ‘On the other hand,’ added Lu cynically, ‘Miss Dove seems to have disappeared.’

  Grant shook his head. ‘Only temporarily.’

  Lu still stared at him with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity. ‘She is quite safe?’

  ‘Naturally.’

  The man eased towards the bathroom and glanced into the room. ‘I feel responsible for her, Doctor, and I would be glad to know where she has gone.’

  Grant poured tea and forced himself to appear off-hand. The situation was on the verge of getting out of control, and it was important that Harmony Dove lost no face—as she would do if she were discovered wrapped in a bundle inside the wardrobe. His only consolation was that she was now completely silent, and even in the stillness of the bedroom there was now not even the slightest hint of a third person breathing. ‘We were playing rather a stupid game,’ said Grant at last. ‘She should return in a few minutes.’

  ‘But from where?’ Lu was quietly persistent.

  Grant looked at him steadily. ‘Come back in five minutes, Lu, and I promise you she should be sitting here.’

  The man shrugged his shoulders. ‘You are really asking me to leave the room, a room in my own house where you are a guest.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then tell me why?’

  Grant hesitated. ‘Mr. Lu,’ he said at last. ‘Trust me a little. But withdraw for five minutes and I guarantee that she’ll come back. I told you that we were busy with a stupid game.’

  The Mongol slowly nodded. ‘You can have your five minutes, but if I return and Miss Dove is not here you will have to explain her disappearance in a most convincing fashion.’

  Grant drew a deep breath. ‘Then five minutes as from now.’

  Lu suddenly produced a pocket-size Colt .25 and dangled it from one finger. ‘One can’t get out of here through any window without being seen or dealt with by my staff. And I shall be only a short distance along the corridor. So please don’t do anything silly.’ He nodded briefly, and seemed to disappear as the door opened and closed almost in the same movement. Lu reminded Grant more than ever of a djinn, and his ability to appear or disappear almost in the blink of an eyelid was a new experience.

  Grant returned to the wardrobe and cautiously opened the door. ‘Not a sound,’ he whispered ‘We don’t want Lu to know about this silly business.’

  ‘You handled it quite tactfully.’ The girl’s voice was muffled, but Grant sensed that she was relieved as he swiftly untied her and helped her to her feet.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said flatly. ‘I was stupid.’

  She lifted the sheet and swiftly straightened out the bed before replying. ‘We were both stupid
. But at least I learned something. You know how to look after yourself, and I have a black belt.’ She stepped into a pair of flimsy pyjamas, allowed Grant to help her into a house-coat and then drew a comb through her hair. ‘Tell Lu we’re ready for him.’

  Grant hesitated. Lu was on edge and might well shoot before asking questions if the door opened ahead of schedule. He knocked loudly, turned the handle and raised his voice. ‘Both here. Care to come in?’

  Lu arrived with one hand in his jacket pocket and Grant knew that Harmony would have marked the outline of his gun. ‘Hi, Lu,’ she said. ‘David says you were worried, but everything’s okay. Relax and join us for a cigarette.’

  The Mongol smiled slightly. ‘Some games can be dangerous.’

  The girl pointed to a chair. ‘Then let’s forget about it. You arrived at an awkward moment.’

  Lu bowed slightly and as he clapped his hands a slightly built house-boy arrived with a third cup. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘I prepare for everything. I wanted another moment with you. And it’s better to talk over tea. Charlie has returned and reported that Operation Coia is moving according to plan. Our people on the hill have taken over and he will soon be ashes. But you may sleep better for knowing what has been happening.’

  ‘You are very kind,’ said Grant.

  ‘Then give what you call a quid pro quo,’ said Lu coldly. ‘I’m curious to know what happened to Miss Dove.’

  The girl forced a laugh, and Grant saw that even then she was anxious to cover up. The idea of admitting defeat in a bedroom brawl was impossible without losing face. ‘Suppose you allow us to have a little private secret,’ he said coldly. ‘Your persistence is verging on bad manners.’

  Lu stiffened and Grant saw his smile darken. ‘I still insist on knowing what happened to Miss Dove.’

  The girl flushed. ‘Lu,’ she snapped, ‘I’m perfectly well and you’re making a fuss about nothing.’

  Lu ignored her completely. ‘Dr. Grant, you have said something which I am forced to regard as an insult.’

  The situation was becoming absurd and Grant cursed his stupidity in having tormented Harmony. But Lu had him guessing, and there was a streak of Scottish obstinacy in his make-up which refused to apologise. Lu’s gun was now pointing downwards and the man was standing, gazing with mild curiosity, when Grant pushed back the chair from under him, catapulted himself forwards feet first with shoulders on floor, and flexing his legs, suddenly straightened them against Lu’s shins. The man dropped and Grant twisted towards his gun arm, half-smiling as the Colt dropped while he locked Lu in a full Nelson. ‘Now I’ll apologise,’ he said mildly. ‘Apologise for having to deal like this with my host. Sorry, but you asked for it. So from now on behave.’ And with the last word he spun Lu across the room against a divan in the far corner.

  Harmony was still sitting when Grant lifted the Colt, and, noting the silencer, slammed a .25 into the cushion less than six inches from Lu’s right ear. ‘Next time,’ he said softly, ‘it’ll go somewhere else. So watch it.’

  The Mongol slowly dusted his jacket, studied the bullet hole and then looked towards the girl. ‘I think he’ll do, Miss Dove. I don’t know what he did to you, but he can look after himself, and that’s all we wanted to know.’

  Grant listened in disbelief, and then thawed when Harmony Dove broke into peals of laughter. ‘You should see yourself,’ she said at last, ‘looking like a little boy who’s been caught doing something wrong. Didn’t you hear me say when we came upstairs that tonight you work for your honey, and that we’d see how you made out? Or have you forgotten?’

  The Mongol was now standing beside Grant and his eyes were twinkling with genuine mirth. ‘We knew you only at second hand, so Miss Dove and I were anxious to see how you reacted to different situations. But now we can forget it and have some tea. Agreed?’

  Grant tried to relax, though he still felt that the carnival was far from over. ‘That Charlie stuff and your men in the hills,’ he said at last. ‘Suppose you tell the truth. The story doesn’t hold water. Too many people involved.’

  Harmony sighed with what seemed to Grant like quiet satisfaction. ‘So you spotted that as well? Top of the class, David. But we’ll see you. Remember how they dispose of the dead in Tibet?’

  Grant nodded, remembering the macabre way in which a nation which lived on frozen ground had to deal with its corpses, and the way in which butchers chopped them into small pieces for carrion to eat.

  ‘Then remember that we have a lot of Tibetans in Nepal. There’s a camp less than three miles from this house and others live on the hills. One of them is Lu’s man and, probably even more important, he is Charlie’s man. Indeed Charlie brings him news of his family every time he makes a trip across the border. But that man is a corpse expert. By this time he’ll have chopped Coia into an unrecognisable load of steaks, and birds or dogs should have cleaned up the mess before midday. Crude, but effective. Because we don’t want some efficient little Nepalese security wallah finding a corpse and trying out Western methods of identification. This technique is much more certain.’

  Grant studied her thoughtfully. The story made sense, and hideous though the thought was there were worse ways of eliminating bodies. ‘Okay,’ he said at last. ‘I’ve an instinct which says that your story holds water. But am I to accept that this rough-house was planned in advance to see how I rated?’

  Lu waved his hands in a gesture of resignation. ‘We felt that a little on-the-spot proof would be more convincing than rumour. We wanted to see how you would react to feminine wiles, to study your reaction when you were interrupted, to have first-hand proof of your ability to wriggle out of what seemed like danger, and to prove whether or not you could cope with the element of surprise. Not forgetting, of course, to check on your ability to pick out the flaws in an apparently convincing story.’

  Grant handed over the gun. ‘You weren’t afraid to take chances. I might have plugged you.’

  Lu shook his head. ‘Hardly. That would have meant still one more body to remove and no one knows better than yourself that right now you aren’t organised to cope.’

  ‘But are you?’ Grant sat down beside Harmony and lit a cigarette. ‘Suppose you tell me what the pair of you have in mind. Because this wasn’t a rehearsal for fun. You’ve got an objective in view and I’ll sleep the better for knowing how we all stand.’

  Harmony turned to the samovar and poured tea for three. ‘Easy,’ she said at last. ‘Tomorrow you go to the Park and use Coia’s passport with your own photograph on it. That may give us a line on his contact man, and after that we tail him to wherever he may go.’

  ‘And then?’ Grant sounded cynical, in spite of himself. The set-up made no sense by his standards.

  ‘Having located the people who are mixed up with Mafia and dope from one angle we then get another fix through the Mother Boo-hoo.’

  ‘Listen,’ Grant interrupted. ‘I know the arguments in favour of that name. She started off as the Living Goddess. She became a head case and got so old that she called herself the Mother Goddess. Then hippies took over and used their own slang to call her a Boo-hoo. After which the name Mother Boo-hoo came naturally. But I absolutely refuse to go on calling this woman Mother Boo-hoo. Or to listen to others calling her something which is sheer corn. So for the sake of my sanity let’s keep this thing reasonably sensible and call the wretched woman simply the Mother Goddess. Agreed?’

  Lu casually lit a long slender cigar. ‘Agreed, Doctor. Hippie slang can sound like phrases from a cheap early teenager novelette. Though call her what one will, the fact is that this old woman is extremely important.’

  Grant recapped. On the following day he would check in at the Park complete with passport and a blurry photograph. He would hope to establish contact with Mafia and later in the day Lu would arrange transport to take them to the Mother Goddess whose temple had been built thirty years earlier in a valley which linked India with Tibet. It was an open point which country she was in, b
ut for sure she was within a kilometre of the frontier: and if it was Tibet there could be another cold war incident if Peking rumbled the arrival of high-powered intelligence wallahs from either Europe or America.

  ‘But they won’t,’ said Harmony firmly, ‘because hippies are already going there in fairly large numbers in spite of local regulations that one can’t leave the Valley of Katmandu. And the valley is surrounded by extremely high peaks which pretty well cut it off from both India and Tibet. Seems one can reach it more conveniently from Nepal itself.’

  ‘And how do we go?’ Grant felt that the trip might be more tricky than either Lu or the girl Dove suspected, especially since Nepal was surrounded by snow mountains which could be climbed only by experts.

  Lu shook his head. ‘Hippies aren’t strong he-men. In general, they are drug-soaked physical wrecks. But in any case Charlie knows the ropes and has his own methods of dealing with check points.’ He stood up and folded his hands in characteristic fashion in front of his waist. ‘So now I’ll leave you. Or do either of you require anything more?’

  Grant eyed him thoughtfully. His every instinct said that he was missing out on something obvious, and that both Lu and the girl were enjoying a private joke which could be important.

  His mind raced through the arrangements and all the ground that had been covered: Harmony’s ‘organisation’ had originally got wind of a possible new Mafia intention to control drugs in Central Asia: confirmation had come through her engagement to the prince, and later through her own contacts with hippies who had included a talkative mafiosa in their group: that had given her a line on Coia and proven that he controlled more than New York State; then through other ‘organisation’ members grilling captured V.C.s in the Mekong Delta a political angle had emerged suggesting that various V.C. group leaders had been hooked on either LSD or hashish—which explained certain atrocities during 1968 and also gave a hint of drug addiction motivating other minority leaders in several continents and possibly even explained some of the violence which had disturbed the United States after the death of Martin Luther King.