The paper pistol contrac.., p.1
The Paper Pistol Contract, page 1
The Paper Pistol Contract
A Joe Gall Mystery
Philip Atlee
Chapter 1
I was stretched out on the terrace studying blueprints, drinking Hinano beer, and wondering what the poor people were doing, when nightfall dropped over Tahiti like a quick curtain. Bang, no nonsense! None of your lingering effects. As the light faded I furled the blueprints, slipped a rubber band around them, then looked out over Vaiere Bay. The jagged battlements of Moorea, nine miles across the heaving plain of water, were darkening fast, their incredibly green slopes turning sooty blue. The sawtoothed crags caught the last pale wash of the sun.
“Maeva,” I called, and she was at my elbow, her round face glistening from the heat of the kitchen. She was barefoot, and wore a bright blue pareu and a halter.
“Oui, m’sieur?”
“Get the boy. Have him clean up for dinner.”
She nodded and went swinging down the broad terrace stairs, across the sun-seared lawn and the potholed highway, and under the slanting palms toward the seashore. By Tahitian standards, Maeva was old and out of style; she must have been thirty-five and was plumping up. Still, it was pleasant to watch her graceful passage, dark hair swinging down her bare back. And the plumpness was excusable because she was one of the best cooks on the island, and I don’t mean taro, breadfruit, poi, or roast pig. I mean French haute cuisine.
Traffic was sluicing along the highway: rackety buses jammed with people, chickens, and pigs; popping motorbikes and scooters; snarling sports cars; and the insolent gas-hogs of Detroit. The sounds of their passage floated up to me, with laughter softened in the short-circuited twilight by the French-Polynesian patois. My ornate bungalow was in the Punaauia District, only nine kilometers from Papeete, and the road in front of it pulsed constantly with the life of the island.
The house had smells, and the tropic verdure encroaching on it had another set of them. The road had the usual petroleum stinks, while the palms, the beach, and the sea contributed still another set. The more immediate aromas of frangipani, gardenia, and hibiscus softened the stench from the sea.
Maeva and the boy came across the lawn laughing and talking, their dim shapes almost indistinguishable. There was someone with them. As they approached the stairway below me, Maeva was scolding. “Where you panga?” she inquired. “What you do with you panga?” The boy laughed and said he had stuck it in a whale, which got away. The cook squealed with rage as they scuffled on the stairs.
“Stop that!” I shouted. The altercation ended, but they came on up the stairs hissing at each other. Then they were standing before me, outlined in the light flooding from the living room. A trio of some interest: the boy in sun-bleached shorts, tow hair plastered to his head and swim fins dangling in one hand; Maeva in what was mock dudgeon, her ebony hair disarrayed; and another boy, who didn’t seem to be a keeper—most fishermen would have thrown him back. He was small, spindly, and wore heavily rimmed glasses, which were salt-streaked and had lenses that looked an inch thick.
“Lose his panga again!” said Maeva, breathing heavily.
“Big deal,” said the boy. “We split some coconuts, and …”
I held up both hands, and they shut up. “Suppose you introduce your visitor, Richard.”
“Oh …” The boy glanced at his myopic little friend. “This is Billy Gebhardt, and I mean he’s the coolest with an outrigger. I thought he might have dinner with us. Okay?”
“Billy, good evening,” I said, and the outrigger expert stepped forward and gave me a half-bow and a quick handshake. “We would be delighted to have you stay for dinner if protocol can be satisfied. Can you manage it, Maeva?”
“Sure,” said the boy promptly, “everybody knows Marvelous is the best cook on the island. Movie stars ask for her.”
Maeva hissed at him again, then nodded to me.
“All right, there’s food enough. Now, Billy, did you arise by spontaneous generation, or do you have a family?”
“Oh yes; sir,” said the earnest little boy behind the thick-lensed spectacles. “We live just down the road.” He turned and pointed south into the tropic darkness.
“Fine. Then you and Richard just romp on down there and get your parents’ permission.”
“Only my mother, sir. My father’s in the States, in Cleveland.”
“Mother, then,” I said, and he and Richard turned and went haring back down the steps and across the shadowed lawn. Maeva brought me another beer. As I poured it she arranged her dark hair.
“He lose three pangas,” she said, and I watched the beer suds.
“Yes, Maeva. But you heard him. Nearly got a whale this time.”
The plump cook snorted and moved back into the kitchen. In a few minutes, she was singing to herself. I wasn’t so pleased; the dinner guest might mean complications. He was obviously part of the baggage of an American tourist lady, without her husband, and any foreign woman who came to Tahiti alone was obviously a little crackers, as our English cousins say. The boy, Richard, wasn’t my boy at all; he was what you might call rented. A prop to support my cover.
My cover was that I was one Millard Durden, from Memphis, Tennessee, Executive Vice-President of Holiday Hostels, in Tahiti to survey the possibility of constructing a multimillion-dollar resort. There was a Millard Durden—fine man, too—and when approached on his patriotic blind side, he had agreed to isolate himself in a Slave Lake lodge in north-central Canada for sixty days. During that period of time, I was to carry out my assignment.
My business in Polynesia was complicated—a step operation. My initial clandestine act was to kidnap and isolate an important French official, a key man in the logistics and security involved in the approaching French nuclear test. Then, as the hue and cry mounted, I was to see that my hostage was taken away from me by a ranking agent of the People’s Republic of China. This agent was somewhere in French Oceania, but we did not yet know his identity.
What made this part of the assignment difficult was that all the islands of the South Pacific and Indonesia except Australia, New Zealand, and Tasmania are swarming with Chinese. The Chinese in these islands almost invariably control all small business and commerce, so that the man I was trying to cut off would have splendid protective coloration.
My third step was to alert French security officials to the fact that their man was being held by representatives of the mainland Chinese. And finally, depending on the success and timing of these previous steps, I was to set up an unsuccessful attempt to sabotage the French test, providing I could make the bungled effort appear to be that of the Communist Chinese. There would have been no logic in actually wrecking the test; the French would only set up another one, with tighter security, in a remoter area of their Oceania.
What my agency wanted was to wreck diplomatic relations between de Gaulle and Mao, as an unheralded contribution to the comity of nations.
I had been in residence for seventeen days already, and Washington was getting edgy as the nuclear test date came closer and closer.
Meditating thus, in the mixed fragrance of a Polynesian evening, I watched a car turn off the busy highway into the drive below my terrace. I walked to the switch at the head of the stairs and turned on the floodlights.
A woman was getting out of a new Simca sedan. “Hello,” she called up, swinging long legs out of the car. I nodded, and she made the immemorial gesture—smoothing the dress over her hips—and came up the steps toward me, smiling. As her high heels spiked at the tiles, I thought without volition that this one was meant for burning, but not before she took a good many men with her.
Her hair was dark and cropped short, like a feathered cap, and she wore a simple sheath dress of lime green linen. Yellow hibiscus blossoms were tucked over her ears, and she was cut high in the stem. Holding a small clutch purse of the same lime linen, she tacked up toward me, her scooped neckline fully freighted by her breasts. Her bare shoulders were deeply tanned, and she wore no accessories or rings.
“I’m Billy’s mother,” she announced. “Mrs. Gebhardt, from Cleveland. I think it’s very kind of you …”
“The whole story is a lie,” I said, taking her cool hand. “Nobody named Billy Gebhardt has a mother who looks like you.”
She laughed out loud, a pleasant contralto freshet that moved her shoulders and her breasts, which obviously neither needed nor had any brassiere. Her frock was not by Marc Bohan; he doesn’t know how. Balenciaga, perhaps.
“You’ll get along here, Mr. Durden,” she said, and her green eyes flicked across me. “I thought empire builders and tycoons were … well … frumpish. Like people from Cleveland.”
“Mmmm … Well, you don’t look a hell of a lot like Shaker Heights,” I said, and she framed her oval face with both hands and shook with laughter.
“I live there, God help me, I live there,” she answered. I asked if she would have a drink. She said no, that she was late for a party at Les Tropiques. Would Billy be a nuisance for dinner? I assured her that he would not, and that Richard and I would walk him home later.
“Fine.” She turned, and I moved forward and took her elbow. We went back down to the little sedan. I opened the door and she swung her long legs inside. Not many women know how to do that gracefully.
“You seem to be a very busy man, Mr. Durden,” she said, reaching toward the ignition keys. “I have passed your house late at night and seen the lights on.”
“True. Work to be done.”
“But you never go to Quinn
“Mrs. Gebhardt,” I said, “my time is limited. From it, I hope, will come a hideous neon Taj Mahal that will be constantly filled with my rich countrymen, destroying what is left of the charm of these islands.”
Her slender hand came off the ignition key; she looked up at me in astonishment. “My God!” she said. “What Chamber of Commerce are you a member of?”
“None at all, Madame Gebhardt. Barely a member of the human race, and most of the time I feel like resigning from that.”
We looked at each other. Traffic went by on the highway; waves lapped, creamed, and foamed on the reefs beyond the towering palms, and I could smell the Arpege rising from the cleft of her breasts.
“This is a stupid party I’m going to,” she announced, not looking at me now but looking at her hands, which were folded across the wheel. “Pilots, naval officers from La Capricieuse, functionaries and their fat wives, people like that…. Will you be up at midnight?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll come to you then,” she said. She turned her head slightly, and the green eyes raked me again. “You haven’t made love to anybody on this island. Everybody knows it. Or perhaps your cook stays late to clean up?”
I laughed. “Madame Gebhardt,” I said, “passion is a singular thing to me. I do not close my eyes and grind my hips at the world.” Then I leaned down, moved the dress off her tanned shoulders, and kissed her full, orange-lipsticked lips. Even in surprise, her response was immediate and hungry. When I straightened, she started the car with furious intensity and backed to the highway; the little sedan went humming away toward Papeete.
Upstairs, I walked through the dimly lighted living room to the kitchen and mixed myself a strong rum punch. Maeva took one look at me, said “wipe you mouth,” and began banging pots and pans around. I was showering when I heard the boys come romping up the stairs.
Chapter 2
After dinner, the two boys played Scrabble while I read Paris-Match and the other papers I had picked up that afternoon in Papeete. At ten o’clock, over their strenuous protests, Richard and I walked Billy home. Traffic had lessened on the highway, and we went past the house of the man who owned the Hotel Tahiti. The next house, a large rambling cottage built on pilings to keep it off the ground and framed by hibiscus bushes, was blazing with lights, and I could see burnished French Provincial furniture inside.
When we said good night to Billy on his porch, he shook hands with me dutifully and said that the dinner had been “real great.” As Richard and I turned back down the highway, I reflected that Billy was right. Maeva’s onion soup, everything she did, was first-rate. It was a clear night, still uncomfortably warm, and as we trudged back toward the floodlit terrace I slipped on an overripe mango and nearly fell. Richard thought this was hilarious and went capering around like a madman in imitation of my recovery. Just before we reached the house, hundreds of crabs went rustling across the highway toward the beach. So, naturally, Richard had to try to drop-kick a few until I told him to stop.
In another half hour he was in bed, and I was sitting out on the darkened terrace. The chilled rum punches Maeva had left for me were stored in the thermos-lined chest beside my couch, and I lay half-reclining. Watching the road, the star-lit ranges of Moorea across the bay, and listening to waves smash against the coral reefs. The cars on the road were fewer now, but going faster, and once I thought I heard the tinny hum of the Simca, but couldn’t be sure.
As I lay there under the brilliant, pulsing stars I could almost forget what I had come for. It was easy to understand how a man could just blow the whole ball game. If, I reminded myself, he could pay $500 a month rent for a house like I was in, $300 a month for a cook like Maeva, and everything else in proportion. When I walked through the nearly darkened house to go to the can and check the sleeping boy, I saw that it was nearly one o’clock, so I decided to write Mrs. Gebhardt off and go to bed.
I was back out on the terrace gathering up my lighter and cigarettes when I heard a slight movement and whirled.
A slender vahine was smiling at me. She wore a yellow pareu and a brief bandeau, and her feet were bare. Over her left ear was a fragrant tiare Tahiti, the small white gardenia of the islands.
“La ora na, popaa!” she murmured demurely, and when she bowed, a fold of the pareu fell away from her golden thigh. Everything was in conspiracy against me—the throbbing stars overhead, the overpowering aromas of the tropic night, and this vision. What seemed to be the shapeliest daughter of Polynesia was giving me, the white devil, an ancient and legendary welcome.
It took me several startled seconds to realize that I was looking at Mrs. Gebhardt from Cleveland.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and it was no lie. “But I can’t shift that fast.”
“Perhaps I can’t either, not really,” she said, and she sat down beside me on the couch. I gave her a rum punch, and she told me about the party. Her escort had been a Qantas pilot, an importunate type with a Guards mustache, and he had chased her all over the hotel. That was why she was late.
“Didn’t catch you, then?” I asked, wondering how Mr. Gebhardt felt about such jiggery-pokery.
The green eyes slashed across me. “When I wish to be caught, Mr. Durden, empire builder second-class,” she said, “I don’t run far.”
“Too right,” I said, “and pardon me.” She laughed, disturbing and mercurial beside me. There was a prickling in my loins. With a wild surmise, I thought that if I played my cards just right, there would be a ball game tonight.
“Are you sleepy?” she asked when I had fished another frosted drink from the thermos box.
“No.”
“All right.” She lay back and stared at me, the iced glass against her cheek. “I want to take you someplace, tourist-monger. Will you go?”
I didn’t touch her, didn’t move. Something was riding her hard; she was half-loaded and furious about something, a wanton burning in uneasy repose. “Yes,” I said, and she considered me through heavy-lidded eyes.
“They sacrifice to the Tiki tonight,” she said angrily, “and the grave worms crawl. But you wouldn’t know about that, would you? For God’s sake, don’t you own a pareu? Or some slip-slops? Didn’t your research team tell you this was the island where love was born? Why did you take the trouble to come? Why not send one of your IBM robots with stainless steel testicles? Tell it how many islanders have syphilis, how many Hansen’s disease, how many missionaries …”
“Okay!” I held up both hands in surrender, walked to my room, and undressed. Then I draped and hip-tied one of the pareus Maeva had bought me, and put on sandals. As we walked down to her house I told her that we had a battery of computers in Memphis, but that it was hard to get passports for them. She didn’t answer, and we got in her car and drove back to my house. There I put another bottle of rum and some limes in the thermos case, and carried it down to the car.
She drove to Papeete and through it, at speed. I lounged beside her, feeling defenseless in the red skirt, and we didn’t speak again until we were roaring up an incline several miles north of town. She jerked the car off the road there and stopped on a promontory.
“This is Point Venus,” she said, sitting with her hands in her lap. “I am half-Polynesian and half-American. My mother was Princess Tiura and could trace her line straight back to the voyages of the long canoes.”
She opened the door, got out, and groped on the floor for her sandals. I crossed around the hood of the car and stood beside her in the starlight.
“Bring the bottle,” she said; and I got it. We went down what had once been a road, but was now a tangle of jungle creepers and vines, and continued downward until the neglected roadway became part of a marshland. The smell of rotting vegetation was everywhere, and I imagined that I could feel things moving around my submerged feet. We crossed a wide and desolate yard, over salt-soured grass, toward a huge two-storied wreck of a mansion. Its windows were sightless black eyes, and the doors sagged in their frames. Starlight put pale shafts down through chinks in the rotting roof.
“This is Orohena House, Mr. Durden,” she said quietly. “I was born here.”
Hand in hand, we stepped up on the porch, and its sodden planks shifted under our feet. I flinched as a night bird exploded out of one of the dark windows, and when my feet rasped on something, a strange, pungent, and unpleasant odor arose. I turned loose of her hand, gave her the rum bottle, and knelt to snap on my lighter. The whole veranda, as far as I could see, was covered by grayish slugs, and it was from the ones I had stepped on and smashed that the odor had arisen. It smelled like strong witch hazel gone bad.
