She went on and on, exciting not a single soul to the goal of higher productivity and impressing no one except Ginger Emerson, who sat on a couch at the far end of the room between a failed opera singer from Liverpool named Shirley and a girl from Naples who once had done a shoe commercial on TV. Ginger was impressed mainly because the inside of a high-class brothel was not very much what she had expected it to be. She had anticipated the furnishings, the overstuffed upholstery, the flocked wallpaper, and the rich-piled carpets, but she had not expected the girls to be such decent types. True, there was an awful lot of flesh flashing about, but that was what they were there for, and the overall atmosphere was not too different from that of the Kappa Kappa Kappa house of her college days. And there was also the undeniable fact that simply being in a place like this produced in any girl a certain sense of wonderment, of. . . what would it be like to ... ?
Dismissing that tingling thought from her mind, she wondered what had happened to Krause. Upon their arrival at the house on the Via Manzoni, he had turned her over to Signora Felluci and then had disappeared.
"You won't be seeing me for a while. But Katerina will look after you."
So far the looking-after had consisted of an introduction to the two girls sitting beside her, an invitation to look over the establishment with a view toward future employment, and then Katerina had launched into the weekly sales conference, leaving Ginger bemused and impressed by the older woman's grasp of the essentials of her business. What was she talking about now?
Orgasms?
". . . very likely that some of you girls have been having orgasms. Now I realize that this is an occupational hazard, but at the same time, in our business an orgasm is wasteful and counterproductive. First of all, it saps your strength and increases your turnaround time. Second, it plants a seed of personal involvement with the customer, which is something that should be avoided. So remember, girls, if you feel one coming on, stomp on it, stifle it, save it for after hours. In other words, come on your own time."
Some of the girls were openly yawning now, and one of the maids was asleep in her chair. When Signora Felluci laid down her pointer and picked up a thick stack of handwritten notes, a collective groan rose up from her listeners. She looked at her watch and shook her head.
"All right, it's getting late," she said reluctantly. "That's all for now."
The meeting at once broke up, with the kitchen staff heading for the back of the house, the maids upstairs, and the working girls gathering into small groups of relieved and animated chatterers. The girls from Naples, whose name was Sofia, turned to Ginger and asked, "What do you think of our Signora Felluci?"
"She's very . . . businesslike," Ginger said cautiously.
"She's a silly old cow," said the other girl, Shirley. "She doesn't know a bloody thing about it with her bloody charts. You don't make a man happy with charts."
Sofia nodded, agreeding. "E vero ... but still it is a good place to work." She looked at Ginger. "Do you come here to work?"
"Actually, I'm not sure. I came with a friend to look the place over."
"Some friend," said Shirley, stretching. Both she and Sofia were dressed for work in baby-doll nighties and nothing else. "I saw you come in with him. Bleedin' Gerry Krause, wasn't it? Oops, 'scuse me, not supposed to call him Gerry. Mr. Gerard Krause himself."
"You know him?" Ginger asked.
Both girls laughed, and Shirley said, "Bloody few girls here who don't. Most of us came here the same way you did. With Gerry, just to look the place over. Not that I'm complaining, mind. I do myself nicely here." "I see," said Ginger, pleased that her suspicions were confirmed. "Then he must be very close to the Signora."
"Like this," said Sofia, holding up two fingers close together.
"But not like this" said Shirley, doing the same, but crossing one finger over the other.
Both girls laughed again, and Ginger looked around the room. "I don't see him," she said in what she hoped was an innocent voice. "I want to talk to him about this before I make up my mind."
"No chance of that," said Shirley. "No chance at all."
"What do you mean?" Ginger felt the pit of her stomach go hollow. "I have to see him."
Shirley stood up and scratched the inside of her thigh, apparently unconcerned about her near-total nudity. "Nobody see Krause while he's here, sweetie. He stays locked in that room of his on the top floor. Nobody goes in, nobody comes out."
"He once was here for a week," Sofia offered. "All that time he stayed locked in the room."
Casting for ideas, Ginger asked, "What does he do for food?"
"The Signora." Shirley grimaced. "Takes the food into him herself, she does. Nobody else allowed to touch it. Treats him like bleedin' royalty; wouldn't be surprised if she tastes it for him, too."
"With all these girls around," Ginger said hopefully, "you'd think he'd want. . "Her voice trailed off as she saw the other two exchange knowing looks.
"Krause doesn't have much use for us," Shirley explained. "He's never touched me, nor any of the others."
"Except for Anna," said Sofia, giggling.
"But she doesn't really count," Shirley said.
"Anna?"
"That one over there."
Shirley nodded at a woman sitting by herself in a corner. Ginger had noticed her before. She was attractive enough, with a well-featured oval face, but she was older than the others, perhaps thirty, and her full-breasted body was thick through the waist. She wore a somber, simple dress and flat-heeled sandals, no makeup and no jewelry save for a tiny gold crucifix at her bosom and a wedding band. She looked less like a whore than a countrywoman who had come into town on market day.
Ginger shook her head. "She sees Krause?"
Shirley nodded. "His one and only. She's not a regular, you see. She comes here only when Krause is due. You wouldn't believe what they do together."
"Nasty," said Sofia.
"No, not nasty, but it's unnatural." Shirley was trying to be fair. "I guess some women have no pride; they'll do anything for the old lolly."
"She doesn't have much else to offer," Sofia said judiciously. "You really can't blame her, I guess."
"But what is it they do?" Ginger asked.
Shirley told her.
"I don't believe it!"
"God's truth. Not that you don't see everything in a house like this. I knew one girl here a while back who got paid ten thousand dollars just to . . ."
Shirley went on, but Ginger wasn't listening. Her eyes were fixed on the woman, Anna, and her mind began to calculate.
The midway of the All-America Amusement Park was crowded. Under the steaming sun the throngs sauntered idly, searching for fun, munching cotton candy and ice cream while children tugged and demanded and adults conceded indulgently, for it still was early in the day. Young girls strolled in protective pairs, young men eyed them hopefully, and older couples walked arm in arm. Mechanical noises rang harsh and loud, the cries of the barkers were louder, but loudest of all was the carnival music blaring from speakers on poles.
Eddie sat in his car in the parking lot, staring at the plywood reproduction of a Scottish castle that formed the facade of the Fun House. He tried to remember everything that Vasily had told him.
"I would have to consider it virtually impregnable against anything except a total wipeout. There are three checkpoints before you even get close to the heart of the place. There's the Mirror Maze, the back of the Wax Museum, and then the voiceprint identification. And even if someone got past all three he'd still have to crack the nut down below. No, the only way to assault the Fun House is to destroy it completely. A canister of VX gas in the air conduits, or afire bombing."
Eddie shook his head impatiently. There was no way that he would attempt a massive assault on the Fun House with dozens of people wandering about inside it and hundreds more passing by on the midway. Of course, it could be done at night, after the park had closed, but that was twelve hours away and he had to act now
.
He opened his lab kit on the seat beside him and stared for a while at its contents. Eventually he filled his pockets with an assortment of tubes and flasks, half a dozen steel pellets, an electronic oscillator, and an HDM pistol with a Bell Labs silencer. He hesitated over the pistol. He disliked such weapons and did not consider himself adept in their use, but he knew he had to take it with him.
He locked the lab kit in the trunk of the car and then strolled onto the midway, heading for the concession stands. There he bought an oversized trucker's cap, a pair of sun glasses, a jelly apple, and a stick of cotton candy. He found the nearest men's room, fed a machine a quarter, and locked himself into a stall. He was in the stall fifteen minutes working on the jelly apple and the cotton candy, and when he came out he was wearing the cap and the glasses.
Back on the midway he waited until he saw a group of young people approaching the Fun House, the boys loudly describing the horrors inside and the girls feigning an obligatory reluctance to enter. He fell into casual step behind them. He had his cap low over his eyes and the jelly apple up in front of his face as he paid his admission, and he was still attached to the group as they all staggered through the Barrel Roll entrance, the girls squealing wildly as they tumbled and sprawled on the revolving floor. Eddie stepped around them, smiling.
He stayed with the group through the Tunnel of Love like somebody's goofy brother tagging along in his crazy cap, one hand busy with the cotton candy, the other with the jelly apple. When they entered the Mirror Maze he hung behind, letting them stumble and shriek and bump their way through before he entered cautiously.
A giant Mancuso glared down at him; he turned, and Eddie the mouse stared back. He moved again and the image decomposed into dozens of fragments, then coalesced into a Mancuso impossibly squat and broad. He turned left and hit glass, turned right and hit glass again, walked straight ahead and the glass seemed to melt away before him. He turned right through an apparently solid wall, turned right again, and came face to face with a smiling uniformed guard.
"Wrong way," said the guard to the funny little guy with the crazy cap and his hands full of goodies. "You made the wrong turn, friend. You go back that way."
He reached out a hand to guide Eddie around. Eddie nodded gratefully and said, "I got a little mixed up back there."
"Don't feel bad; plenty of people do that," said the guard, and then the cotton candy was under his nose, the sticky fibers clogging his nostrils, the ether vapors flooding his brain. He pulled back his head, but the cotton candy stayed with him, stuck to his face like strawberry jam. He opened his mouth for air, but the sticky tendrils were there as well. He struggled to breathe, tried again, and then folded down, unconscious as he hit the floor.
Eddie stepped over him and raced down the corridor clutching his jelly apple. He burst into the storage room of the Wax Museum and almost broke stride as he was stunned by the realistic statuary: Lizzie Borden with her ax, Jack the Ripper and his knife, the Little Princes cowering in the Tower. Across the room the two guards jerked around at the sound of his running feet, hands reaching for the pistols at their belts. Eddie threw the apple directly at them and flung himself face down on the floor. The apple, loaded with magnesium oxide, landed between the two guards, detonating on contact. The resultant noise was no louder than a door being slammed, but the brilliant flash of green was blinding. The two guards dropped, unable to see and out of action. Eddie ran by them without pausing, cutting hard right and down another hallway, heading for the third checkpoint.
The abbey of the Order of Saint Vincent of Ferrer perched on a crag high in the eastern Pyrenees, as massive and as formidable as a medieval fortress. Behind and above it rose higher peaks still, stepping up to the mountain enclave of Andorra. Below it the valley fell away so sharply that the switchback road winding up from below, when seen from above, resembled the coils of a snake about to strike. The abbey stood alone, removed from the world by the solitude of mountains, removed from the nearest town as much by centuries as by miles.
Self-contained and self-sufficient, the brothers of the order dwelt behind the heavy monastery walls much as they had done for hundreds of years. Originally an offshoot of the Beghards, that unpopular and mistrusted society that was condemned by the Council of Vienne in the fourteenth century, the present order had drifted over the Pyrenees from France to find a home among the crags and tors above Puigcerda. Not until two centuries later was the present abbey built, and by then the brothers of Saint Vincent had settled into a way of life designed to last the ages, a life devoted to contemplation and prayer, to the making of fine wine, and to the constant purification of the body and the spirit through a daily scourging and flagellation of the flesh.
For this practice of self-inflicted punishment the order was indebted to its founder, Saint Vincent of Ferrer, who had encouraged flagellation as the ultimate expression of the ascetic ideal, and for centuries the succeeding generations of brothers had scourged themselves twice daily. At the canonical hours of lauds and compline they marched in a loose circle round the narthex of the church, chanting plain- song as they beat their own bare arms and shoulders with bristling scourges, whipping themselves with a quiet passion. The blood that they drew at those times was the only blood allowed to be spilled within the confines of the abbey; even a chicken had to be slaughtered in the fields beyond the walls. The brothers of San Vicente led well-ordered lives, and it was to their abbey, and within those walls, that Joseph Wolfe, the Chessmaster, had fled to sanctuary.
Vasily Borgneff stared up at those walls from a field below the abbey. He had seen Wolfe's car disappear behind them after a tortuous trip up from Barcelona, the dark blue Lincoln Continental edging through the narrow entryway hung with solid oaken doors, which had promptly closed behind it. Vasily had driven his own car on beyond the monastery, two miles further up the winding road to a bend where it could be safely left, and then had worked his way down through the fields to a point below the abbey. Now he stared up at those walls, his one good eye squinting against the lowering sun, the false eye an unaccustomed weight in the other socket.
Strong Cluniac influence, he thought, admiring the double transepts that crossed the nave of the church and the echelon of apses clustered at the turreted east end.
His eye traveled from the walls to the acres of cultivated land below the abbey, all of them devoted to the production of the grape that was used to make the distinctive Vino San Vicente. Much as the Carthusian and the Benedictine orders produced their own liqueurs, the San Vicente was the exclusive property of the brotherhood and was fermented and bottled only within the monastery walls. Now, at the height of the growing season, the vines were full and glossy under the late-afternoon sun. In the middle of one of those fields, Vasily could see the brown habit of a toiling monk, the only human in sight for miles, moving down the row, pruning and tending the vines. Smiling, Vasily sauntered through the field to wait at the end of the row. He seated himself on the ground with his back against an algaroba tree and, to pass the time, took from his pocket the latest in portable electronic chess games. He set up an ending, and the lights in the squares flickered on and off as he positioned the pieces. He studied the board, moved a piece, and the battery-operated computer made a countermove. He nodded approvingly at the sophisticated response.
A handy gadget, he thought, folding up the set and patting it affectionately. He slipped it into his pocket as he saw the monk approaching.
"Buenas tardes," he said as the monk came up to stand in the shade of the tree. "How are they growing?"
The monk did not answer, but he threw back the cowl of his habit, which had been protecting his neck and his head from the sun, and gave Vasily a happy grin. He was a young man with an open, friendly face, and in his work-hardened hands he carried a pruning hook and knife. He used one of those hands to describe how well the vines were growing. It was a gesture of pride.
Vasily looked at him curiously. "You do not speak?"
The monk shook his head, still smiling.
"Do your vows prohibit speech?"
Another shake of the head, and another smile.
"Are you able to speak?"
A nod.
"Ah, then you prefer not to speak," said Vasily, who had heard of orders whose members were free to exercise such an option.
The monk nodded enthusiastically.
"An excellent way to live," Vasily told him. "I can think of many who would profit by it."
The monk made it clear with signs that there was entirely too much chatter in the world, although he seemed delighted to be part of this one-sided conversation. Vasily was about to ask him when the grapes would be ready for harvest when the abbey bells began to ring, the peals bounding down the valley like boulders set free.
"The Angelus?" asked Vasily.
A nod.
"Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariae."
The monk's nod was solemn this time. He pointed to himself, and then to the monastery walls. It was time for him to go, time to join with his brothers in prayer, and then to sit with them at the long refectory table to eat the thick potaje, the bread, and the fruit that formed their staple evening meal. All this he conveyed in a series of delicate gestures.
"Momentito, hermano," said Vasily as the monk turned to leave. He reached into his pocket and felt the ampule there. "Before you go, I should like you to forgive me."
The monk turned back, a puzzled look on his face. After a moment of hesitation, he spoke for the first time. "I am not a priest, my friend. I cannot hear your confession, if that is what you mean."
"No, not confession, only a forgiveness. I wish you to forgive me for something I must do."
"Only that?" The monk shrugged. "That is easily done. Everything is forgiven within the grace of God, and so must you be, too."
"Gracias, hermano." The hand holding the ampule came out of his pocket. He snapped the thin plastic sheath under the monk's nose and seconds later caught him gently as he fell. Equally gently, he dragged him further into the covering shade of the algaroba. He looked down at the young man's face. There was still a hint of a smile on his lips. Almost reluctantly, Vasily stripped him of his robe and sandals, and put them on.
The Sleeping Spy Page 26