The skeleton coast contr.., p.1
The Skeleton Coast Contract, page 1
The Skeleton Coast Contract
A Joe Gall Mystery
Philip Atlee
Chapter One
The shapely dancing teacher and I were testing an aphrodisiac and had been at it for some time. Late sunlight was arrowing through the Ozark pines around my mountain eyrie as we pursued our experiments with single-minded devotion. Norma Jean, the red-haired hoyden who was my collaborator, came fully qualified. An Honors graduate in Fine Arts, she was currently a ballet instructor and endowed with the muscular development so important in kinetic research.
The aphrodisiac we had been testing was ginseng, or at least the fabled root of that plant. Often called “Sang,” these forked, aromatic roots have been a major drug in the Chinese pharmacopoeia for thousands of years. The American variety of the plant is called Panax quinquefolium (after the Greek word for panacea), and it colonizes in moist, fertile places where there is shade. Domestic cultivation is possible but arduous, and gardened ginseng brings only half the price of the wild plant. At present, the market value of the roots is around $25 a pound, and all American production is sold to Hong Kong brokers.
Our experiments had been conducted on tatami mats in my open-sided teahouse set on the slope of the formal Edo garden surrounding my hilltop house. We had spent most of the day there in kimonos, sipping root infusions and preparing salads of organic-grown vegetables with the root chopped, diced, and sliced into them. The Chinese value especially, and will pay a premium price for, roots shaped like a man, and we had even sacrificed one such specimen in our rigidly controlled tests.
At suitable intervals Norma Jean and I drank warmed saki from tiny porcelain cups. To clear the palate, as it were, because I feared that my enthusiastic ballerina might be unduly affected by purely tactile pressures. This, of course, would have negated the tonic effects of the roots and rendered our efforts nothing more than a woodland romp.
Still, I suppose you can press even the most zealous associate too hard. As the afternoon waned, Norma Jean seemed to become less interested in the ginseng than in the saki. And indeed finally leaped straight up from the cross-legged lotus position and threw off her kimono. Went into a series of entrechats, splits, and pointes that would have split her tutu, had she been wearing one. Flaming hair swung around her head like snapping fire.
“Tell you what, old dad!” she cried. “Let’s toss all these moldy vegetables into the pool and make out like old straight-arrow!”
I shook my head gloomily. “Dance on, Pavlova,” I said, because I was getting a little sick of the goddamned roots myself. “And don’t call me ‘Dad.’ I’m old enough to be your husband.”
She laughed and went on twirling, and I was watching her careless abandon when a lightplane stuttered over my hilltop home. I looked up, frowning then, because my house was in a remote mountain location, far from any commercial airway, or even an airport. Norma Jean glanced at my uplifted head and stopped dancing. I turned the small brazier fire off, and she followed me up the winding flagstoned path to the house, pulling her kimono on hastily.
My home was a three-story clapboard castle set on a high hill. The gingerbread house had been restored to mint condition; it stood in lonely eminence on a tract surrounded by tall pines. On the west side a thirty-foot waterfall plunged glacial water into a dark green pool. At the outer edge of the formal garden was a dump of black bamboos framing a weathered limestone figure, half life-sized, of a bodhisattva I had bought in Korea.
There wasn’t a nail in the house. The floor planks were hand-mortised, and the Gothic windows held stained glass from that island outside Venice. Since the Ozarks are in tornado alley, I had compromised enough to bolt all the sills and the ceiling into concrete dead-men, but that was my sole concession to modernity. Behind the waterfall was a cavern in which I had built a sauna hut, with a two-inch hawser rope hooked on the side of it. The rope was for swinging out through the icy waterfall and dropping into the pool after sweating out. If your heart didn’t stop, this trick did wonders for your circulation.
The intruding plane banked, came back across at a thousand feet, and someone jumped out of it. At that altitude the parachutist didn’t have much room, and his vented orange-and-white chute popped almost immediately.
Telling the girl to stay where she was, I grabbed a loaded carbine from the front hall closet and pounded out the side porch and into the meadow to the east.
The jumper knew his business; he was working on the shroud lines, maneuvering himself into the center of the clearing. When he hit the ground, knees flexed, I was waiting for him with the carbine off safety.
Since there was a slight wind in his favor, he was dragged only a few steps and collapsed the chute easily. He was young, wore a dark Brooks Brothers—type suit, and seemed an unlikely drop-in. As he unhooked himself I saw that he had an attaché case chained to his wrist. The copper salts of rage broke loose in my mouth, and his smile faded when I told him to stand still and identify himself or I would saw his legs off at the knees.
“God Almighty, man!” he said, eyeing the carbine, “I’m just old Newberry, Richard J., Courier for the U.S. State Department.”
“All right, old Richard J.,” I said evenly, “walk to the house ahead of me. When you are on the porch, lean against the wall with your hands spread wide.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” he said petulantly, and I fired a burst around his modish chukka boots. They do dance, you know. When he had completed his impromptu jig, he walked to the porch and assumed the attitude against the wall. I frisked him at arm’s length, with the muzzle of the carbine touching his medulla oblongata. He seemed to be clean, so I ordered him inside. He was frightened by now; sitting on the big leather couch in the living room, he had a hard time unlocking his dispatch case.
While I was reading the blue-covered sheath of instructions he had brought, with the carbine canted against my right knee, Norma Jean came in on bare feet. I told her to fix the courier a drink of Jack Daniels, double, and went on reading.
The instructions were as unsatisfactory as his method of entry to my property, and when I had finished them, I went back to the butler’s pantry with an even worse taste in my mouth. Cut it with a straight shot of Carlos Primero brandy and returned to the living room.
“Richard J.,” I said, “I don’t know your antecedents, or why you want to be in the agency or the Foreign Service. But you just did a spectacularly stupid thing. I could easily have blown your backbone out of your body while you were drifting down on me. Whose idea was it?”
“Mine, sir. Just mine. I belong to a sky-diving club in Washington and I thought—”
“All right. So you chartered a plane where?”
“Saint Louis.” He gulped down the last of his drink hurriedly, and I shook my head. The location of my lost hilltop was now a matter of record in some frigging air-taxi service at Lambert Field. Crossing to the couch, I shoved the blue-backed instructions into his case.
“You take these back, Richard, and tell them I said no.”
“Sir?”
“Tell them I said no. That I refuse the contract.” And before he could protest again, I handed the keys of the Rover to Norma Jean. She had been sitting on the other end of the couch, with her legs folded under her. I told her to escort the gentleman out the front gate and drive him to Springfield, where he could get an early air connection back to Washington. That there was money in a wallet in the glove compartment in case she needed any.
She stood up, still barefooted, wearing only the kimono. “Don’t I dress first?” she asked.
“You’re more dressed now than I have seen you for some time,” I said. “Get him out of here.”
They left, and I stood waiting in the butler’s pantry. When she shook the gate of the high electrified fence that enclosed my property, I pressed the release button. A minute later I heard the Rover start and drive down the steep hillside road. Then, in the lowering darkness, I went back to the small meadow and furled up the parachute.
Chapter Two
Norma Jean got back before midnight, and I drove her across the northwest corner of the state to Fayetteville. She got out in front of Fulbright Hall, after we had kissed with moderate fervor, and I gave her a fond pat on the tail. Said we must do it again soon. She said that would be great and went into the shadowed lobby. But I knew as I drove away that we wouldn’t be doing anything anywhere, ever again, because she shouldn’t have been there when the harebrained courier dropped in.
On the north edge of the campus I found a telephone booth outside a closed filling station and called Neal Pearsall at his home. Neal was Director of the agency’s Action Division. As the ring burred along the line I wondered if it was possible to tap such calls, unless you had foreknowledge of them and worked for the telephone company. Probably not, on a monitor basis.
“All right.” The deep voice answered brusquely.
“Joe here.” He didn’t ask “Joe who?” either, because we were old friends.
“Say on.”
“One of your couriers came to see me this afternoon. A real oaf, named Richard J. Newberry.”
“I know him. A trifle spirited, but he’ll get over it.”
“Possibly. But perhaps I won’t. The dumb bastard got to Saint Louis and decided to cut the butter. Chartered a lightplane and, to practice his sky-diving, jumped into the field beside my house.”
Neal whistled down the line and was silent for several seconds. “That wasn’t smart,” he admitted.
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“Now, Joe,” said Pearsall calmly. “I knew about the assignment, but I didn’t know it had been given to you. I approved the idea when it came across my desk.”
“Then, old friend, your memory is seriously impaired. On two points. Completely outside of the fact that at my price this would be the most expensive heckling of psychedelic goofs in history, my contract says that I always have the right of refusal, without prejudice. Also, I am never required to accept an assignment inside the States. Not since that stirring fiasco when Asmodeus made assholes out of all of us. Or don’t you remember?”
“I remember it well, Joe. I nearly quit the agency because of it.”
“All right. Don’t send me any more of these fink things like infiltrating the Pot Set. Those people might just be right when they say don’t trust any sonavabitch over thirty years old. And I want no more parachuting couriers.”
“Are you through complaining?” he asked. I thought things over, to check my bottled-up bile.
“I guess so,” I said.
“Okay. I’m sorry about the boy’s heroics, and we’ll put the assignment through to a routine agent. That should have been done in the first place. What number are you calling from?”
I looked at the number on the pay phone and told him.
“Stay there five minutes, please,” he said, and hung up. I stepped out of the booth and lighted a tiny cigar. They are just as dangerous as cigarettes but cause stomach cancer instead of the lung type and thus take longer. Less than three minutes later the lonely suburban phone rang and I stepped back into the booth and palmed the receiver off the hook.
“Yes?”
“I’ll be in Tulsa tomorrow,” Pearsall said briskly. “Three o’clock in the afternoon. Same suite, the one where we met before you made the Mexican trip. Do you remember the number?”
“Yes. Will you bring the potables or shall I buy them?”
“Joe,” he said haughtily, “we don’t buy our booze. Like the ladies from Boston, with their hats, we have our booze.”
“Good to know,” I said, laughing, “Adiocito.”
Chapter Three
The suite in the downtown luxury motel in Tulsa was like scores of others the agency maintained on a year-round basis. Since we were not supposed to operate inside the U.S., I had often wondered how they hid this enormous housekeeping item, but I guess nobody had ever questioned it. I drove my Rover up the oval ramp to the fifth floor, parked it, and pushed through swinging doors into the air-conditioned hallway.
Neal was in the second bedroom of the suite, as he had been the other time, and once again newspapers were strewn all over the room. Although hundreds of people in agency headquarters did nothing else except break down every publication in the world, that wasn’t good enough for Pearsall. He was afraid they would miss something. He claimed that you could learn more about a strange town by pricing used baby carriages in the want ads than by reading the news stories and editorials. And he had once assured me, solemnly, that you could tell how much class a place had by examining the toilet paper for hallmarks.
The big man hadn’t changed much. The balding head was fringed by more gray and his gut was more pronounced, but at several inches over six feet he could carry it. Regarding me over the top of a paper, he looked like an old bulldog who hadn’t made best of show but wasn’t going to be surly about it. His right leg didn’t exist below the scars on the lower thigh, and the complicated prosthesis was propped against a chair, its leather fittings sweat-stained.
He had lost the leg while trying to chivvy a freezing Marine Company back out of the Changjin Reservoir ambush in Korea.
“Colonel,” I said, “you receive just like Marie Antoinette.”
“Frig that chatter, Joseph,” the reclining giant said amiably. “Had you the ordinary decency to bring dancing girls, I would have strapped on the peg and danced all night.”
The maimed bastard was right. Fake leg and all, he had once beaten me at handball, and I was not the softest touch in the world. That was the day I gave that game up. There was ice on the coffee table and two bottles of Black Daniels, so we toasted absent friends. Straight and thoughtfully, because there were a lot of them. After the third drink I mentioned the napalm surveillance assignment, which had been so stupid, and Neal said “Yes, yes” irritably. That he had already stopped up that rathole; it wouldn’t happen again.
We didn’t reminisce long. Our business is a closed and subterranean fraternity and its losses are continuous in this age of undeclared wars. Men like me, and the others controlled by Neal Pearsall, were kept busy justifying the high-minded declarations of our governments. We were nonreasoning malcontents without conscience who had to tidy up diplomacy in the back alleys of the world.
I had been at the business for a long time and was one of its most highly paid practitioners. But the strain and the abnormal relation to ordinary society was always there. My name is Joseph Liam Gall, ex-Marine Major, ex-many-other-things. I held the hidden rank of Brigadier and was high on the Civil Service pay ratings, but that was only part of it. In addition I had well-defined “perks”; these included all expenses and a free call on all military hardware and personnel to operate them when on assignment. I also had the right of refusal on any assignment and did not have to give a reason.
I had joined the agency soon after being invalided out of the Marine Corps toward the last of War Two. Not counting four decorations earned in Pacific combat, I had been awarded three other medals by the agency. These medals, while authentic, were called “jockey-strap” awards, and I would never be able to wear them. The pay was good, however.
We had drink four and I sipped it morosely, staring at the wall machine that brewed chemical coffee. I had had a drink of that ersatz coffee, complete with powdered chemical cream, in this same room just before Neal Pearsall had ordered me to the Fort Worth Federal Hospital. To pick up a deliberate addiction to body drugs. Before the Mexican assignment, where I trapped an ebullient Texas millionaire who was about to be appointed to an important ambassadorial post in the Far East. Because of the monkey grinning on his back, he didn’t make it.
“All right,” I said, and Neal nodded and stubbed out his cigar.
“You know Cairo, Khartoum, and South Africa,” he stated. “You’ve hunted in the Kenya highlands and been to Addis Ababa on assignment for us. That right?”
“You’ve got the files,” I said. “And during the Second World War, while only a zeal-inflamed lad, I ferried new Douglas transports from Natal, South America, to Ascension Island, Lagos, Fort Maidugari, Aden, Masira Island, and Karachi. They were replacements for the China National Airlines on its Himalayan flights.”
I remembered those flights well because they were continuous. CNAC lost 100 percent of its fleet every eleven months. Most of all I remembered the stench of the African stops.
“Good, a bonus,” said Neal. “What we’re going to do is smuggle you into the Congo from the east side. Not only into it but into a jail in Bukavu, where you’ll sweat your guts out. You will be under sentence of death from Mobutu’s Government in Kinshasa.”
“That’s dangerous,” I commented. “Those goddamned simbas eat people. Have I any guarantee that they won’t get loaded on corn beer and eat me? Or shoot me in a forgetful moment?”
“It’s all worked out with Mobutu. His Elite Palace Guard will be in Bukavu solely to protect you. If he doesn’t produce that protection, he forfeits all American aid. And he needs it badly now.”
“I’ll remember that in case I get eaten,” I said. “Why am I to be cast into this stinking Congolese can?”
“There are four white men in it now. Mercenaries who used to work for Tshombe. They were stranded when Colonel Schramme flew the main body of mercenaries out of Kabembe. That’s in Rwanda, just across the border from Bukavu. These four fall guys are also awaiting execution, but you will break out and take two of them with you.”
