by Troy Conway
“Don’t argue. It’s got to be.” Another light went on in my brain. “Hell, what’s to worry? Bring me home with you before dinner. As a new beau. Then I’ll pretend to leave and double back. Your house have a garden? Trees? Plenty of shrubs? It’ll be easy. I’m an old Eagle Scout from way back.”
“Well—” She was still troubled.
“Katie, you want to go to Hollywood? I called my friend this morning. He’s going to talk to Zanuck and Joseph Levine.”
“My house,” she said, “is a ranch-type place. Surrounded by a wall of ivy. There’s a lot of trees and a French door leading into the garden, and you wouldn’t have any trouble at all. Honest.”
“That’s my old Katie,” I laughed. “Want to make love before we start out on our enterprise? It still is a bit too early to take a beau home to see your house”.
“Do you have to ask?”
“No, but it’s considered polite where I come from.”
“Then my answer is Yes, and my God, how do you keep on going like that? Don’t you ever wear out?”
“It’s a short life and a merry one,” I said. “Get out of those duds and get on the bed.”
Katie performed both activities with remarkable speed, and since I was already naked, I merely joined her on the percales. The sun warmed our bodies and we began our love games. Slowly, gently and with great tenderness, until the savage beast claimed us both and we became a whirlwind of rotating rumps and churning thighs. I laid her good.
I forgot about the work on my thesis.
Older dolls are all I said they were, but there’s nothing wrong with a seasoned virgin either.
Katie had learned quickly and well.
I was hard put to keep up with her.
But I did.
So she laid me but I laid her.
We went spinning and sinning into our own private world of pune, tune and half-moon. She could have set it to music all right.
We had a ball in Betchnika, Damon style.
That’s the only way to travel in bedrooms.
Ask the girl that owns one.
Poppa Commissar’s house was all that Katie had indicated. When we reached it at sundown in the Renault, Katie parked the car in a plain, bare garage just behind the house. The building was a ranch, indeed, and thoroughly in keeping with the Communist platform of the bare necessities. No frills, no ornaments, just brick and stone and plain common clay. The trees and the shrubbery and the ivy-colored walls closed out the rest of the Betchnika world. There was no other car in the garage.
“What a break,” Katie enthused. “Poppa’s out and nobody’s home. All I have to do is stash you in my bedroom. It’s a cinch.”
“No servants or maids?” It was too good to be true.
“Uh-uh. On Poppa’s salary? Tsk, tsk. Besides, he has to show Moscow how frugally he can live on their salary. I’m still wearing my high school prom formal. I was big for my age.”
“You still are. Especially around the curves. Okay, let’s hurry. How about that bedroom?”
The house was even more spare. Barely furnished. Solid wooden chairs and tables, plain bookcases without glass, no fancy rugs or jars or bric-a-brac. Katie’s room was at the far end of the building. It was slightly warmer-looking. A big bed, a bigger closet area, but at least she had dollied it up a bit. With nice curtains, some fresh flowers in a vase and the walls were a mosaic of show business luminaries, especially vocalists, male and female. Glossies of Tom Jones outnumbered the Frank Sinatras by about five to two. Katie led me to the bed, sat me down and clasped my hands. Her eyes searched my face.
“You be careful now, you hear? I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
“Nothing will. When Poppa and Gekko and Orkoff show up, you go on about your business and I’ll make with the ears. We’re bound to learn something. Besides, you’ve already told me what you could do with the pills if you ever get your hands on them.”
She nodded. “Wouldn’t be hard. I told you—I know they contain some strychnine as an aphrodisiac. So it would be ABC biological snaps to alter the strychnine solution—not quite enough to kill but enough to change the formula and effect drastically. We could substitute saltpetre in the other pills and really goof things up that way too. Boy, would that confuse Gekko and Orkoff/ Imagine giving a man a silver pill, expecting orgiastic miracles, and getting a cat too bored to get an erection! That I gotta see.”
“You will. You’ve been swell, Katie, and if you don’t get that Hollywood offer, I quit.”
“Don’t do that. At least you tried,” she said, almost shyly.
A car horn suddenly blared in the stillness outside. Katie’s eyes flew open. We could hear tires slithering on the driveway.
“Poppa! Quick get under the bed. He probably went down to pick Gekko and Orkoff up the way he always does when the lab closes for the day. Oh, hurry—”
It was the age-old situation. Don’t get caught in the female’s bedroom when Poppa comes home, even if this time the reasons were a bit different. I squeezed under the bed and was faced with rows of shoes. Sneakers, sandals, loafers, high heels, the works. Maybe Poppa had to scrimp but Katie was nuts about shoes. At least they didn’t smell. I burrowed down behind them. I heard Katie go to the door, step through and walk down the hall. Now, gruff voices muffled from the front of the house. Real Russian bears. They always came on like a circus act. I waited, straining to listen. I heard Katie greet her father and his friends and offer some trumped-up story about coming back to change her clothes. Somebody grunted something in Czech. It must have been her father and the noises died off. But I heard glasses tinkling. Russians also like to drink. Then footsteps sounded in the hallway, again, and Katie was back in the room. She sat down on the bed in front of me, her nice ankles in view. She was trembling. Spy-nerves, I guessed.
“What’s the matter?”
“He wants me out of the house. So he can be alone with them. Oh, Rod, I'll have to leave.”
“That’s okay,” I whispered. “Just as well. They won’t expect me to be here. You go. I’ll see you later.”
She reached down under the bed, offering her lips. I kissed them. Her eyes were worried.
“You be careful. And don’t be long. Find out what you have to and get out. I’ll wait down the road about three hundred yards with the car. Okay?”
“Deal. Scat, now. The sooner I do this, the better off we’ll all be. Thanks, Katie.”
“For what?” she rasped. “They find you here, they’ll line you up against the town hall wall and shoot you. You know that, don’t you?”
“Will you beat it?”
“Oh, you!”
Tearfully she leaped off the bed and flounced from the room. Her shoes walked down the hall, quickly and fearfully. I heard her say goodbye to Poppa Walsky and then the front door slammed and the house went all quiet again. The men all laughed.
This was it.
I was alone in the house with the men who had the answer to the silver pill enigma.
Today, Silver Pills.
Tomorrow the World!
Not if I could help it.
I sneaked out from under the bed, slid over to the door, peered out and listened. A low hum of conversation flowed from the other end of the house. Poppa was already in conference with his two Fed jackals. I was in luck. They were speaking English!
The hall was narrow, dim and empty. I eased down it, keeping close to the wall. I had to move in a hurry if something happened. There was no telling what in a strange house you are in for the first time. I hoped to hell there weren’t any household pets, like a dog or a cat or a talking parrot. I wanted to kick myself in the ass for not asking Katie about a little item like that. Some spy I am. James Bond could take lessons from me I was so smart.
Suddenly a telephone rang somewhere.
I froze to the wall. My heart flip-flopped.
Heavy shoes, sounding like clodhoppers, thundered on the wooden floor of the house. I didn’t dare breathe.
&
nbsp; The phone stopped ringing as somebody picked it up and I let my breath out again. For a second I didn’t know whether it was the phone in Katie’s bedroom or not I lost about a pound sweating that one out.
Then a man cursed and laughed out loud.
“Wrong number!” a voice boomed. It must have been Poppa Walsky. He sounded darling. A real peach. “Forgive me, gentlemen! More wine, Orkoff? Take another drink, Gekko! We must discuss the pill—”
Bingo.
My shot in the dark had worked. I had come to the right place.
More glasses tinkled.
They sounded like they were settling down to some serious drinking. That was fine with me. Men swacked and plastered are more inclined to be looser with their tongues. Ask any bartender.
I slipped down the short hallway. Drawing closer to the sounds of revelry. All of the men, including Poppa Walsky, had big gruff voices. Real bears all the way. I guess it goes with the Russian weather. Even if Poppa was a Czech.
I stopped where the hall ended and waited.
There was a pause.
And then Gekko or Orkoff said, almost sadly, “There is nothing else we can do. We haven’t perfected it as yet. To continue our experiments in Betchnika, we would have to show our superiors a far more improved pill. As it is, I fear we shouldn’t try any more experiments here. It may create riots, unrest—what with the Russo-Czechoslovakian situation as it is, I think it wiser if myself and Orkoff moved on.”
“No,” Poppa Walsky pooh-poohed the idea. “Try a little longer, eh? You can never tell.”
“Yes,” the third man, Orkoff, chimed in. “Walsky is right, Gekko. We can try a few more tests. We have the willing men and the women this time. But nothing like that foolhardy risk we took with the old men. That was a mistake. The old fools!”
“Moscow could have had our heads for that,” Gekko agreed. “Very well—one more major experiment. Silver Pill Number Seventy-Nine. I hope we manage something this time.”
They drank to that. Glasses clinked.
“Besides,” Gekko continued, his voice blurred with wine. “What if some fool commissar comes down from Moscow to check our progress? He could have us booted out of the project because of our failures. You know how those swine like to curry favor with the Party.”
“Da, da,” Orkoff muttered feelingly. “And then take all the credit too. If any. Very well. We try once more. I’m sure we can come up with something this time. Day after tomorrow, I will give our men Number Seventy-Nine. See what happens—”
More talk flowed and I turned around and went back down the hall. I slipped back into Katie’s room and went to the window. I had heard enough. More than enough. Gekko himself had provided the solution. I knew what I had to do. I opened Katie’s window and dropped out into the garden. It was no trouble at all to stalk through the garden, leaving by a side gate and go down the road to where Katie was waiting for me. The sun was well down behind the trees when I spotted the Renault. My mind was tingling with expectation.
Gekko had opened his big mouth and now I knew how to scuttle the project known as Silver Pill.
I wondered if my Russian was good enough to pass muster in the Firnl Laboratory.
If I could get my hands on a proper uniform, Commissar Damonski was going to pay a required call on Gekko and Orkoff at the Firnl Lab. At the special request of the Kremlin.
After all, what progress did they have to report to Moscow after all these months of research, money and futility!
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The next twenty-four hours were a whirlwind of activity. My next and greatest plan was about to be fulfilled. But believe me, I couldn’t have done a thing without Katrina Walsky. On Operation Silver Pill in Betchnika she was absolutely indispensable. When I told her about my plan in the Renault going back to town, she kept shaking her head, saying it wouldn’t work; but in the end, she finally capitulated. And I didn’t have to threaten her with Hollywood, either. She had become my woman and I was her man. Variations Lover, Baby and Rod. When she was really hung on me, she called me something that sounded like putchinksa which must be the Czech version of Pussycat or Tiger.
Anyway, she worked her rump off for me for the better part of that day. The sun was gone but we needed the dark to operate in. Boy, did we ever.
First she got her hands on a commissar’s uniform for me. It was about a size too small but that didn’t matter. All it did was emphasize my height and size, and since I wanted to impress Gekko and Orkoff the next day, that was all to the good. It seemed the local Little Theatre in Betchnika to which Katie belonged (she kept telling me how she had knocked them in the aisles playing Hedda Gabler) put on a lot of plays with Russian Communist plots and scenes. So there were plenty of Red uniforms in the Property House behind the theater, which was more like a barn than anything I’ve ever seen. It figured. Who would expect the Reds to subsidize a little theater and lay out some rubles for overhead?
Secondly, under cover of night, I drove her out to the Firnl Laboratory and went into my own Jimmy Valentine routine. The place was deserted, having closed hours ago, and there were no lusting women hanging about this time. So we crept onto the property and I jimmied open a rear window and helped her climb in. Luckily, she had visited the lab a few times with Poppa Walsky and she knew the layout. There were no guards, not even a nightwatchman. I tell you We have to beat the Reds, one way or another. They skimp and cut corners in the wrong places. I waited for her outside, keeping the Renault parked in the same place she had the day before. Her biology background was going to be put to the acid test.
“Remember,” I warned her before she disappeared into the inky interior of the place, “look for Number Seventy-Nine experiment. That’s the one they’re going to try next. It’s that or nothing.”
“Oh, I know, I know,” she whispered nervously. “How many times do you have to tell me?” Then she was gone and I went back to the car to sit, smoke and listen to the crickets. She was gone a long time, like an hour, and the moon had come out and I’d gone through half my pack of butts before I saw her cutting across the spooky lawn that surrounded the place, like a shapely ghost. I jumped with fear when she materialized.
When she got back into the car, she was shivering.
“Did you shut the window after you? Remember, this has to be perfect. No slip-ups.”
“Yes, damn you. What a job!”
“How did it go?”
She folded her hands. “Like a Swiss watch. The lab has all the facilities. I took the whole load of Number Seventy-Nine—there was about a hundred silver capsules, emptied them and switched the ingredients like we said. I doubled the strychnine in some, added saltpetre to others and used some other chemicals lying around the place. If that silver pill isn’t screwy now, it never will be!”
“That’s my girl. I’m proud of you.”
“You should see those pills. Kind of an inch long, all silver on the outside. Must be a sugar-coated outside, tasting like sugar. A fifty percent solution.”
“Skip the technical stuff. Now, we’ll drive back to town and I’ll brush up on my Russian with you on the way.”
“Why? Gekko and Orkoff like to speak English. They show off with it. Being bi-lingual is a mark of culture. You know that.”
“Just in case. Now, hear me recite the alphabet, then I’ll do numbers and some of the standard comments like Hello, Goodbye and Good Morning. My accent’s pretty good.”
She shook her head as I backed the Renault out to the roadway, turned around and headed back to town. She was worried about me again, as she had since I first outlined the plan.
“Forget the language problem. What if Gekko and .Orkoff ask for credentials? What if they decide to phone Moscow to confirm your visit? What if they demand to know who you really are—then what? Huh? You’ll be a dead duck and I’ll cry the rest of my life.”
“Don’t worry. You don’t know the Red mind like I do. I studied in Russia for a year on a grant. If I squawk loud enough, ac
t officious and tough, they’ll step in line. And I got an ace in the hole. They won’t be able to check me out in Moscow.”
She snorted. “Why? You going to drive around town now cutting all telephone wiring?”
“Not necessary, my fine feathered female. You’re forgetting what day tomorrow is.”
She frowned. “The first of May. So what?”
“So what? It’s May Day! Russia’s biggest holiday. Nothing will be open in Moscow. Nothing official anyway. They wouldn’t dare get huffy about it tomorrow. It would be like spitting in Lenin’s face!”
“Rod!” she squealed with delight, throwing her arms around my face. I almost hit a rabbit which hopped across the roadway in my car lights. “You’re a genius. You really are—and I thought you only had a penis for a brain. Not that I minded—”
I chuckled, feeling good. She was a yummy broad. Great company in or out of bed.
“I,” I said, “manage to use my other head once in a while.”
She laughed. “Two heads are better than one.”
“Never mind that. What are you going to do about your father tomorrow? I don’t want him at the Firnl because I want you there and your old man might get in the way.”
“Don’t worry about him. I’ll put enough sleeping powder in his oatmeal to make him sleep all day. He’s got a lot of allergies anyway and the doctor prescribed a whole load of tranquilizers for him to cut down on the pain and discomfort. Forget about Poppa. I’ll take care of him.”
She sounded like she still remembered Mamma and what Poppa Walsky had done to her. So I did what she told me. I forgot about Poppa Walsky, the commissar of Betchnika. He would not get in the hair of Commissar Damonski of Moscow.
The next great thing Katie did for me was to get her hands on a car. A big, impressive looking Daimler that looked like it might have come from the big cities. It seemed she did have a boyfriend or two in town and one of them whose father owned a farm and bet on horse races now and then had managed to buy a big car. She managed to borrow it.