“Ah kill them mothers fore they was born,” said Boom Boom. “Ah waste them good.”
“Better pump some grape his way, boys,” said Philander. “He a mean mother.”
And then, surprisingly, the younger white man spoke to the older as if Philander, Piggy, Dice and Boom Boom with his piece were not there.
“All right, it’s settled. The general will be first tonight and then I’ll check with you in the morning. I’m bringing Chiun up. I don’t feel as sharp as I should.”
“All right,” said the older Charlie. “But now I imagine you understand why it’s so important we are involved in this. Everyone else has been compromised because they’re known.”
“I’ve got bad news for you,” said the younger honkey. Boom Boom looked at Philander and shrugged. Dice and Piggy both pointed index fingers at their heads and circled them indicating the honkies were crazy. Standing in the middle of Washington’s Harlem, four bloods with a piece looking to waste them, and these two loose ends were talking compromise this and set-up that as if they were going to make it out in one piece.
“Bad news,” said the younger honkey. “Somebody knows something. I was jumped in Miami. We’re not totally clean anymore; we’ve been tapped somewhere along the line.”
The old geezer put his hand to his mouth. “There’s only one other person who… ”
“That’s right,” said the young looney.
“My God,” said the old skinny honkey. “I hope it doesn’t mean what I think it means.”
Then Boom Boom mumbled a curse and pushed the revolver in the younger honkey’s face.
“You guys bugged about something, man,” said Boom Boom. “Maybe I ain’t coming down too clear, But this is a holdup.”
“Okay,” said the younger one. “How much you want?” Sweet as you please, he said that.
“How much you got?” asked Boom Boom.
“I’ll give you guys a hundred apiece. And well call it even.”
“Fifty,” said the old honkey with the briefcase.
“Make it a hundred. Why not,” said the younger screwball. “Fifty doesn’t go far these days.”
“A hundred here, a hundred there. It all mounts up. Make it seventy-five.”
“Okay. Seventy-five,” said the younger honkey.
“Can ah get involved in this heah thing?” said Boom Boom, waving the gun wider because obviously someone was missing something. “This is mah holdup and ah got a right to say what ah’s gonna get.”
“Seventy-five be all right with you?” asked the younger honkey.
“No,” said Boom Boom.
“No way,” said Piggy and Dice. “We wants it all. Everything you got. That briefcase too.”
“Well, sorry,” said the younger honkey and then it all happened very fast. Boom Boom was shrieking and jumping up and down, shaking his hands which flopped as though attached to his arms only by loose rubber bands.
Piggy and Dice were on the ground, their legs stiff and then Philander thought he saw the flash of a white hand in the street light, but he could not be perfectly sure. He was still seeing the flash come at him when someone told him he was now in the hospital emergency room and everything was all right.
CHAPTER SEVEN
MRS. VANCE WITHERS DID NOT tell the police everything. Yes, she awoke during the night to find her husband dead in bed. No face. It was horrible. No. She had heard nothing. Nothing.
“You mean to tell us, lady, that somebody did that to your husband and you didn’t hear a thing?”
The detective sat on her new divan, his $75 suit on her $1,800 leather divan, and dared to speak gruffly to her as he pencilled things into a little notebook. He was only a sergeant or something.
“Does your colonel know you speak like this to people?”
“I’m a cop, lady, not a soldier.”
“Well, General Withers was a soldier,” said Mrs. Withers icily. She had thrown on a flimsy pink something and now wished she had worn something heavier. Like a suit. And perhaps conducted the interview on the porch. She did not like the sergeant being so familiar. It was akin to disrespect for the departed General Vance Withers.
Two white-clad attendants removed the general through the living room on a wheeled stretcher. A white sheet covered what was left of his head.
“Yes, ma’am. We are aware the general was a soldier.”
“I sense a certain disrespect in your voice, Sergeant. There is insubordination in manner, you know.”
“Lady, I am not a soldier.”
“That should be apparent to anyone.”
“You are the only one, Mrs. Withers, who was with the general when that terrible thing happened. I’m afraid that makes you a suspect.”
“Don’t be absurd. General Withers was a four-star general and a good candidate for five stars. Why should I kill him?”
“Rank is not the only relationship, lady. Like sometimes there are other things between men and women, you know?”
“You really aren’t a soldier, are you?”
“You still claim you heard nothing?”
“That is correct,” said Mrs. Vance Withers. She pulled her pink nightdress tighter around her shoulders. She was an attractive woman with the sexuality of incipient middle age, a last longing fling of a body no longer designed to bear children.
Only—Mrs. Withers had a little secret. But she had no intention of sharing it with an enlisted man. So she listened to the grubby police corporal or whatever he called himself and remembered just a few hours before, thinking she heard something and turning in bed. And then she felt those delicious hands quiet her eyes gently, just the fingertips on her eyelids, and then the strong but velvet smooth hands awakened her body until, almost as if electrically shocked, she was alive with desire, throbbing, demanding, needing and then there was fulfillment as she had never dared dream fulfillment. Shrieking in sudden and complete ecstasy.
“Vance. Vance. Vance.”
And the magnificent hands were still there, to keep her eyes gently shut and in blissful satisfaction. Complete, she returned to sleep, and awoke again only when she thought she felt Vance salivating on her shoulder.
And she turned and her husband’s pillow was a mass of blood. What she had felt was his blood.
“Oh,” she had said. “Oh, no. No.”
And then she phoned the police and here she was, somehow not totally distressed. Although Vance was destined for a fifth star. She just knew it. What a way to die, on the threshold of your fifth star. She grieved with her husband’s memory,
“I’m going to ask you again, Mrs. Withers. Your husband’s head was literally taken off and you heard nothing? Not even a scream?”
“No,” she said. “I heard nothing. One cannot hear hands move.”
“How do you know it was hands?”
Hmmm, she thought that was a mistake.
“Well, lady,” said the policeman, “don’t think we think human hands could do that.”
Mrs. Withers shrugged. These enlisted men were so stupid really.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THERE WERE DEFINITE ADVANTAGES to being the confidential secretary to a banker from the centuries-old house of Rapfenberg. The salary was good. There was a lot of travel. There was a sense of excitement and the feeling of being in on important things—even if, sometimes, they were a little too complicated to understand.
It was a sweet job, especially for a twenty-four-year-old American girl who had originally come to Zurich to ski. Eileen Hamblin told herself that again as she tried to convince herself that the last three months had not really been so bad.
There had been no traveling and that, she realized, was the source of her discomfort. She had been virtually chained to this awful desk for three months because Mr. Amadeus Rentzel had work to do in Zurich and that had, for the very first time, introduced in her the suspicion that banking might be dull. Just plain dull. Banking, she thought in a very un-Swiss-like manner, could be just a boring pain in the ass.
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br /> If she had been a better secretary, she might have tried to learn something about banking, finance and monetary policy, so she could perhaps share in the excitement others seemed to find in them. Gold was gold and silver was silver. They were used for jewelry. But money was used to pay the rent. She could find no possible relationship between the paper currency she used at the grocery store and somebody’s pile of gold buried in some fort somewhere.
Mr. Rentzel had tried to explain, but it was useless. And now he no longer tried. And for the past three months, he had been different somehow, spending more time at his desk, always deep in charts on cash and reserves and gold flow.
She remembered the day it had started, how he had come out of his office and said “Gold stocks are dropping on the New York Stock Exchange.”
“That’s nice,” she said.
“Nice?” he said. “It’s awful.”
“Is there anything we can do about it?”
“Not a damn thing,” he said, disappearing back into his office.
From that day on, her first job every day was to begin checking gold prices on major stock exchanges around the world. In the last month, they had been going up and so had Mr. Rentzel’s spirits.
Suddenly Mr. Rentzel became extremely popular. Formerly, he would travel all over the world—with Eileen—to see clients. But now the clients were coming to him. A regular United Nations in the last month. Orientals. Russians, even.
There was another one today. His card had read “Mister Jones.” Eileen had allowed herself a very small, very controlled smile. The man had an accent like Ludwig Von Drake, and if he were Mr. Jones, she was Jacqueline Onassis.
The man known as Mr. Jones was inside Mr. Rentzel’s office now, nervously fingering the catches on a black leather attaché case, which was fastened to his arm with an old-fashioned pair of handcuffs.
“I am glad your nation has decided to bid,” Rentzel told the man.
Rentzel was tall and sandy haired and looked younger than his fifty years. He wore conservative clothing, not because he liked it, but because a banker could wear nothing else. He was a very good banker.
The man he addressed—Mr. Jones of the business card—was a small, fat man with a bald head and thick, horn-rimmed eyeglasses. He watched Rentzel without speaking, with slightly less animation than that shown by a subway rider reading an overhead advertisement.
“Of course, the bombing demonstration at St. Louis was very impressive, was it not?” Rentzel said.
Jones grunted into the silence. Then there was more silence. Then Jones said, “I have the money here.”
“In dollars?”
“Yes.”
“And you understand the rules?”
“Please repeat them,” Jones said and reached for a pen in the inside pocket of his ill-fitting blue serge suit.
Rentzel raised a hand in a traffic-stopping gesture. “Please. Nothing in writing.” Jones slowly withdrew his empty hand while Rentzel walked around the desk and sat in his chair, facing Jones across the wide expanse of walnut.
Without waiting, he began to talk. “Your two million dollars will be held by me as a good-faith deposit on behalf of your country. The bidding will be conducted seven days from today in the New York offices of the Villebrook Equity Associates.”
“I have never heard of them,” Jones said.
“That is the proof of their quality,” Rentzel said with a smile. “They are bankers, not public relations men for themselves. At any rate, the bidding will be conducted there by me. Each nation will be allowed one bid and one bid only. The minimum price is, as you know, one billion dollars. In gold. The highest bid over one billion dollars wins.”
“One billion dollars,” Jones said. “It is an awesome figure.”
“What is for sale is also awesome,” Rentzel said. “Control of the government of the most powerful nation in the history of the world.” He went on. “By the way, you should know the competition. Besides your own country, I expect bids from Russia and China, Italy, France and Great Britain. And oh, from Switzerland too.”
“You Swiss always were adventurers,” Jones said with a chuckle.
“And you Germans always were fascinated by the possibility of controlling others. Oh, the bids must be in writing and sealed. All unsuccessful bidders will have their good-faith deposits returned to them by me. I will, of course, give you a receipt for it now.”
“It must be interesting to be able to sell a government,” Jones said. “Interesting, that is, for the person doing it. It would seem the only person who could do it would be the President,” he added somewhat clumsily.
“Who is doing it is unimportant,” Rentzel said. “The fact is that my client can do it. The incident with the nuclear weapon on St. Louis showed that. Tomorrow, there will be another incident. It will involve the Central Intelligence Agency. When you hear of it, you will recognize it. The power to accomplish such things will be yours if you are the successful bidder.”
“But one billion dollars in gold? Do you realize how much gold that is?”
“In the neighborhood of one thousand tons,” Rentzel said. “Don’t worry. In Switzerland, we have the facilities for storing it. And the trust of our client.”
“We may not bid,” Jones said sullenly, simply out of dislike for this man who knew all the answers.
“It would be your loss,” Rentzel said. “The other nations plan to. One can tell by the fact that gold mining stocks are moving up in value on their stock exchanges.”
He smiled. Jones knew that Rentzel had seen the price of gold stocks climbing in Germany too. Rentzel realized that Germany was already beginning to stockpile the gold needed to back up their bid.
“Well, we shall see,” he said lamely.
With his left hand, he quickly unlocked the handcuff on his wrist and placed the attaché case on the desk before Rentzel. “Do you wish to… ?”
“No, that’s not necessary,” Rentzel said. “In matters like this, we make no mistakes.”
He rose and shook hands with Mr. Jones, who quickly left. Rentzel opened the briefcase and looked at the neat piles of thousand dollar bills. Two million dollars.
With the nonchalance of the professional banker, he left the briefcase open on his desk and stepped into the outer office. Jones had gone. His secretary was cleaning her nails.
She looked up, and was disappointed when he said, “Pay close attention to mining stock prices in Paris and in London.” Then he smiled, and said, “And make us reservations for a flight to New York Sunday night.”
Without waiting for an answer, he turned and walked back into his office. He could not see the huge smile that illuminated her face.
Great, she thought. New York. Banking could really be fun, after all.
On the other hand, she could not see the smile on Rentzel’s face. The CIA incident, he thought. After that, all the countries will get in line to bid.
CHAPTER NINE
“GOOD EVENING, BURTON,” SANG Dr. Lithia Forrester.
An athletic man, on the verge of going to pot, stood in the doorway in sandals, slacks and open-necked shirt. He had a deep tan, even through his receding hairline.
His eyebrows narrowed and two dark, puffing bags under his watery blue eyes stood like pedestals beneath statues to the great god tension. He picked at his temple.
“Uh, yeah. Good evening.”
“Won’t you come in?”
“Of course, I’m going to come in, Dr. Forrester. What do you think I’m here for?”
Dr. Forrester smiled warmly and shut the door behind Burton Barrett, an operations chief of the Central Intelligence Agency, recuperating from the rigors of the quiet, thankless pressure of working one’s ass off in a void. Reporting to people he did not know. Having other people he did not know report to him. Situation reports which came from places he did not know and went to other places he did not know. This for fifteen years—then he had snapped. And now he was being mended at the Human Awareness Laboratori
es. Prize patient number one.
“Won’t you sit down, Burton?”
“No, Dr. Forrester, I’m going to stand on my head, thank you. I like standing on my head.”
Lithia Forrester sat down behind her desk and crossed her legs. Burton Barrett plumped himself down into a deep leather couch, not looking at Doctor Forrester but staring up, out into the sky. He did not focus on the stars or even the glimmering reflection of the inside lights on the dome. His was a concentrated not-staring, and what he specifically was not staring at was Lithia Forrester.
“Well, this is it, as if you give a shit,” he said.
“You’re rather hostile tonight, Burton. Any special reason?”
“No, just run-of-the-mill hostile. You know, in the morning you’re hungry and in the evening, you’re hostile.”
“Is it something to do with a need, Burton?”
“Need? I don’t have needs. I’m Burton Barrett from the Main Line and I’m a wasp and I’m rich and I’m handsome and therefore I don’t have needs and feelings. I have no sympathies, no loves, no emotions. Just strengths and greed and, of course, controls.” Burton Barrett whistled nervously and softly after he said this. He drummed on the couch.
“Needs?” he repeated. “No, I don’t have needs. Burton Barrett has no needs. Burton Barrett has no friends. Burton Barrett needs no friends. Sexy Burton Barrett is in the Central Intelligence Agency. That’s sexy, right?”
“No, that’s not sexy, Burton. You know that. And I know it.”
“I have such a sexy job, it took me weeks to be relieved of duty, then cleared to come here to you.”
“That’s not unusual for your line of work.”
“Have you ever spent hours discussing your possible emotional problems with an FBI agent? An FBI agent named Bannon? And then waiting for him to check me out and then to recommend a psychologist I mean, that’s something—Bannon! Or am I not allowed to be prejudiced against the Irish? I forget who you’re allowed to be prejudiced against. It keeps changing.”
“We’re not dealing with what’s bothering you, Burton.”
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