by Nick Carter
And I found, as Helga had told me, that she and her sister Maria weren’t completely identical. There was a big difference in the way they made love. Both women made love with infinite imagination and tremendous, open pleasure. But there the similarity ended. While Maria had been silent and intense, her movements exquisitely subtle, Helga was wild and abandoned, her hands, hips, and mouth constantly exploring my body, exchanging pleasurable sensations for each one she received. Her whole being was continually writhing, quivering, and stimulating me to greater and greater heights of ecstasy. It was as if—and the mirrored walls heightened the effect—I was making love to a dozen different women, each with a different approach and reaction. Finally, she gave a high cry of pure pleasure and fell back on the bed.
After a moment she leaned over me. “I make you happy?” she asked, covering my face with kisses.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, you make me happy.”
“I’m happy, too,” she said. “You are the man I thought you were.”
I pulled her gently toward me so she lay on top of me, our bodies pressed together from head to toe. We lay motionless, neither of us speaking. After a moment she gave me the small gasp of surprise I was expecting.
“Shh,” I whispered to her.
She was silent again, but not for long. “Oh!” she cried. “Oh! Oh, Dumplink! OH!” Her body shook convulsively again until, with a long, low moan of rapture, she rolled over on her back and shut her eyes.
My regular programs of body and mind exercises had come in handy once again, enabling me to give Helga a final gift of pleasure she hadn’t expected.
Five
Helga opened her eyes and smiled softly up at me as I bent my head over hers. “It was lovely, lovely, lovely,” she whispered. She rolled over and climbed out of bed. “You rest, Dumplink,” she said, kissing me and leaving the room.
In a moment she returned with a bottle of champagne and two glasses. She filled one of die glasses and handed it to me. “This,” she said, “will keep you occupied while I take a shower.” She kissed me again and went into the bathroom, humming happily. As I stretched out luxuriously on the bed, I could hear her running the shower.
I took a sip of the chilled Dom Perignon. Outside the wind had risen. The fourth wall of the room had drapes across it, and I knew that behind the drapes were doors to the penthouse’s garden that ran around all four sides of the apartment. Behind the door something was banging. I set my glass of champagne down next to the bed, pulled on my trousers, and went over to the door. When I pulled a section of the drapes aside, I saw that one of the doors was ajar and swinging in the wind. I pulled the door shut and latched it.
I was halfway back across the room when that infallible sixth sense, a subconscious warning of impending danger, sent me its message. Without knowing why, I instinctively flung both hands up in front of my throat I’d acted none too soon. At the same instant, a thin wire noose was being tossed over my head and settled around my shoulders. The wire, which would have been embedded in my throat, was, instead, cutting deep into the flesh of my out-flung hands.
There was a heavy grunt from my assailant and a savage jerk on the noose. I ducked and rammed backwards with my shoulder. I still couldn’t see who was behind me, but in that sudden lunge, I did catch a fleeting glimpse of two struggling images in Helga’s wall of mirrors. I looked again and saw myself and the man behind me reflected there. The man was Z1!
His face was contorted with the effort of his assault, but there could be no mistaking his identity. It was the same man I’d played handball with at the athletic club that afternoon.
It was impossible to try to figure out why he was trying to kill me now. All I could do was defend myself. And it was an eerie, unsettling sensation to be watching someone trying to murder me in the very same mirrors where only a short time before I had seen myself and Helga intensely enjoying sex.
He still hadn’t noticed the mirrored wall and didn’t know I was watching him in it. He started to raise his leg to jam his knee in my back. I kicked out savagely with my left foot and caught him in the kneecap, smashing it. He gasped in pain and started to fall, pulling me down with him. I tried to squirm out of the wire noose, twisting my head around as I fell. He held doggedly to the noose, still trying to strangle me. I could see his face clearly now. His eyes were glazed—as if he were hypnotized or drugged.
Up until now I had hoped to be able to defend myself without killing him. But I saw that was impossible. I drove the rigid edge of my right hand into the base of his throat with a lethal karate chop. The blow was hard and clean. His neck snapped, and he was dead, probably without ever knowing what killed him. His body sagged to the floor, the head twisted grotesquely to one side. I pulled myself up and stood there, straddling his body.
I could hear the shower going in the bathroom. The deep pile carpeting on the bedroom floor had muffled the sounds of our struggle. It seemed obvious to me then that Helga Von Alder had lured me to the bedroom, knowing that Agent Z1 was going to make an attempt on my life afterward. As good as she had been with me in bed, I could never forget that she and her sisters were all experienced actresses.
On the other hand, I reminded myself, there was still the possibility that she was innocent. Z1 had known I was seeing Helga this evening and could have tailed me to the apartment. If, as I now suspected, he had orders to kill me, he could have slipped into the room from the terrace while Helga and I had been making love, and she wouldn’t have known any more about it than I did.
If that was true, I couldn’t let Helga appear from her shower and find a man I had killed lying on her rug. There could be no explanation that would satisfy her without blowing my cover. If I did that, the only lead that AXE had on the case, the Von Alders, would be worthless. There was only one thing I could do—turn the body over to Hawk, who had all the facilities at his command for discreetly disposing of it.
I bent down, hoisted the corpse up by the arm-pits, dragged him across the room and through the terrace doors, and dumped him outside. Then I hurried to the bedside phone to call Hawk. We had to talk without a scrambler.
“This is serious business,” I said as soon as he answered. Speaking tersely, I filled him in on exactly what had happened, improvising a code as I went along. I concluded by saying, “My friend and I will be leaving here shortly. Can you handle the mopping up operation?”
Hawk understood. “Leave the arrangements to me,” he said, “But do drop in and see me later tonight.”
“I plan to,” I answered and cut the conversation short when I heard Helga turn off the shower in the bath.
A few minutes later Helga came into the room, wearing a sheer black negligee that revealed every superb detail of her body. I was again stretched out on the big bed, sipping champagne from my glass. Fortunately, the death of Agent Z1 had been bloodless, and there was nothing in the room to indicate the struggle that had occurred there only moments before. If Helga had been in on the plot and had returned expecting to find me a corpse, she gave no indication of it. Instead, she cuddled up on the bed beside me while I poured her a glass of champagne.
“A amore,” she said, touching my glass with hers.
“A amore,” I agreed.
After we had drunk, I swung my legs off the bed, and said, “Come on Dumpling, I’m going to take you out to dinner. Man does not live by amore alone. At least, not this man.”
The restaurant we chose was a small, dimly lit French place not far from Helga’s apartment. It was still snowing outside but the restaurant was warm and cheery, and the service and food were superb. But I really wasn’t hungry, since all through the meal, I kept visualizing the grisly scene that would be taking place at Helga’s apartment as Hawk had the body of the dead AXE agent removed.
Helga didn’t appear to notice my preoccupation, and she ate heartily, chattering vivaciously throughout the dinner. Once she made a mock pout, the same gesture Maria had made when I left her on Whiskey Cay, and said, “Dumplink, le
t’s take a weekend trip somewhere, so we can be alone. You went off with Maria. Now it’s my turn.”
The kind of joking competition that existed among the girls amused me. “What did you have in mind?” I asked.
She made a vague motion in the air with her hand. “Mexico. Spain, perhaps. The south of France. After all, the jet is just sitting idly in the hanger. We might as well make use of it.” She suggested this as casually as if she were talking about a taxi ride across town. And I could see that she was serious.
“Well see,” I said, keeping my options open since I didn’t yet know what kinds of complications there were going to be from the death of the AXE agent.
Helga nodded and then surprised me by suddenly turning serious. It was a mood I never expected from any of the giddy Von Alders.
“I’ll tell you something, Tony,” she whispered, her fingers intertwined with mine as we sipped our cognac. “I get vibrations from you, vibrations of great strength. It’s what I’ve spent all my life looking for in a man. The gentleness of a caring lover and the strength of a man of authority. Sometimes you find one thing or the other. But both— never! That’s very good.” She frowned and said slowly, “Once I tried to explain what I was looking for to a man I know. He was gentle but not strong, and he said I felt the way I did because I had never known my own father. He said I was looking for a lover and a father-figure all in one. Do you believe that?”
I shook my head. “I never speculate about things like that, reasons for feeling. The feelings themselves are what count.”
“I think so, too,” she agreed. “But I do think about my father sometimes, and I know Maria and Elsa do, too, although we never speak of him.”
“And you don’t remember him at all?” I asked.
“No. Only what Ursie has told us. He was killed in Berlin during one of the Allied bombing raids in World War II. My sisters and I were very small then, and it was only a miracle that Ursie got us out alive.”
She smiled and brightened up again. “But life has been good since then,” she said.
Later, when I took Helga back to her apartment, I stopped in long enough to make sure Hawk had removed die body from the terrace. Of course he had attended to the matter. As I left Helga, she reminded me again that she wanted us to take a weekend trip together. I promised to let her know. Then I went downstairs and took a taxi to AXE headquarters.
Six
AXE’s New York office was on the Lower West Side of the city in a warehouse in the dock area. The cab driver wasn’t too happy when he heard the address. I guess he thought I was going to mug him en route, because I heard him sigh with relief when we pulled up in front of die place. I over-tipped him and got out. As I .started across the sidewalk, he leaned out the window and asked, “You sure this is the place you want, buddy?”
I waved him away. His feelings were understandable. The whole waterfront area was dark and deserted. The building that housed AXE headquarters was blacked out except for one lighted room in the front of the building. What the cab driver couldn’t know was that all the other dark windows in the building were painted over to conceal the bustling activity that went on inside twenty-four hours a day and that men with powerful infrared telescopes observed the street outside constantly. Actually, the cabbie couldn’t have been safer anywhere in the city than right there, outside the most powerful counterintelligence agency in the world.
The night security man on duty in the lighted front office, which looked like an ordinary warehouse office, pressed a buzzer under his desk, and I passed through an iron door to a manned elevator. The sentries with their telescopes in the upstairs windows had already cleared me with both men while I was still approaching the building.
“Hawk left orders to take you to the basement as soon as you came in,” the elevator operator said. The car descended.
The basement—that meant Hawk was waiting for me in the agency’s morgue. Like most of the world’s supersecret intelligence organizations, AXE had to have its own morgue on the premises to handle those corpses that couldn’t be turned over to the police right away. Most of the bodies, however, were eventually placed in the hands of local law-enforcement officials after the way had been cleared so there would be no embarrassing questions asked.
I found Hawk standing beside the sheeted body of Z1. The AXE medical examiner, Dr. Christopher, was with him.
Hawk nodded to me and the medical examiner, whom we called Dr. Tom, said, “I ran a preliminary autopsy, Nick. It agrees with what you told us. His death was caused by a broken neck.”
“Did you find anything else?” I asked.
Dr. Tom shook his head. “Nothing so far. Why?”
Instead of answering him, I spoke to Hawk. “Did Agent Z1 report back to you today with my suggestion that we try to get an autopsy done on the brain of Ambassador Kolchak?”
“No, he didn’t,” Hawk said. “He Came back here to headquarters and told me that you had made contact with Helga Von Alder. I didn’t see him after that. There was no mention of an autopsy. Is that important?”
“It could be,” I said slowly. “It might supply us with a possible motive for his attack on me.”
Hawk frowned. “I don’t follow you.”
I knew it was safe to talk in front of Dr. Tom, who had top-level security clearance on all AXE activities. “Well, when he jumped me in Helga’s apartment, he appeared to be dazed—like someone who was not in control of himself—yet his physical actions were perfectly coordinated.”
“You mean,” Hawk interrupted, “you think he was one of the assassination brigade? Much as I dislike the thought that one of our own agents could be under the influence of this—this power or whatever it is, I agree.”
“But that wouldn’t necessarily explain why he would try to kill me,” I resumed, “unless I had said or done something that was threatening whatever it is we’re fighting. The only tiling I can think of was my suggestion for an autopsy. Since he didn’t pass the suggestion on to you but did try to kill me, it would seem that was the connection.”
“What exactly did you think an examination of the ambassador’s brain would show?” Dr. Tom asked.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But we have been speculating that the men involved in these incidents were brainwashed in some way. So the autopsy on the Russian was a stab at proving the brainwashing theory. Maybe we’ll find nothing, but then we’ve got nothing to lose by trying it.”
“Yes, I see,” Dr. Tom said. He looked down at the corpse lying on the AXE morgue slab. He glanced at Hawk. “How about it, Chief?”
Hawk hesitated for only a fraction of a second. “Go ahead,” he said, nodding.
Dr. Tom pulled the sheet up over the frozen features. “It’ll take me a couple of days to do the job,” he said thoughtfully, “I’ll send you a report as soon as I have the results.”
Hawk and I left the morgue in silence and rode the elevator up to the second floor of the building. That floor was the nerve center of the New York headquarters. A staff of more than fifty people worked there twenty-four hours a day at teletypes, radios, and closed circuit television sets that communicated with the offices of the world’s police forces. The corridor that led to Hawk’s office ran alongside the big room. There were one-way glass windows on the walls so that those in the corridor could see into the room but those in the room couldn’t see them. This arrangement prevented other AXE personnel from observing the secret agents who reported to Hawk’s office.
Once we were in Hawk’s office, the chief of AXE settled wearily into his desk chair, rummaged through his pockets until he found a chewed-up cigar, and stuck it, unlit, in his mouth.
“I must confess, Nick,” he said, “this case has me worried. What’s your opinion about die Von Alders?”
“It’s hard to say,” I replied, choosing my words carefully. “As far as I have been able to determine, they’re exactly what they appear to be on the surface. But it’s hard to discount the fact that every time there�
�s a new development in the case, they’re somehow connected.”
“Speaking of new developments,” Hawk cut in, “I haven’t had a chance to tell you about Monte Carlo. We just got the word tonight from Interpol.”
“Monte Carlo?” I asked.
“Yes. There’s a run on the casino there. A man named Tregor, a Belgian, is breaking die bank. Tregor’s brother-in-law had tried to stab the Chancellor of Germany a few weeks ago, then plunged the knife into his own throat instead. We have nothing on Tregor, but you’d better go and check him out anyway.
“The casino management has temporarily stopped the play,” said Hawk. “But they’ve agreed to resume it in twenty-four hours. I’d like you to be there when the casino reopens, but I don’t want you to be out of touch with the Von Alders. Can you manage both?”
“It’s no problem,” I told him. “Earlier this evening Helga pleaded with me to take a trip with her to Mexico. She said we could use her private jet.”
“And you think she’d settle for Monte Carlo?” Hawk laughed. “You must put a lot into your work.”
“It does have its rewards.” “I can well imagine,” he answered, waving me out of his office in dismissal
Seven
It was early, a little before 8 A.M., the next morning, when I phoned Helga’s apartment. I knew that she wouldn’t be up that early, but I couldn’t put off calling her any longer if we were going to fly to Monte Carlo that day.
The voice that answered was drowsy with sleep. “Hello. Hello?”
“Helga,” I said, “this is Tony Dawes.”
“Who?” she asked, still half asleep. “Hello?”