Understrike Read online

  “I got Avallon and the automobile downstairs waitin’ for youse. And a couple of the boys are outside in the lobby justa make sure,” he said, smiling proudly at this display of efficiency.

  “Yes, I saw them on my way in,” said Chicory. “Got Cop stamped all over them in red ink, and two darned great bulges in their jackets. Worried me.”

  “Aw, hell! It shows, doesn’t it? I keep telling the Organisation they want people like me. Inconspicuous people.” Siedler in his wild check jacket was about as inconspicuous as a harlot at a harvest festival.

  “It’s the same with our police,” said Boysie dryly. “Damn great boots, and they all wear the same kind of raincoat.”

  A puzzled look crept over Chicory’s face: “Boysie? Why are the cops playing guardian angel to you?” There was an embarrassed pause.

  “Oh well, you know ... When you’re negotiating a big government contract ... and after that silly spot of bother last night.” Boysie tailed off lamely. The pause continued for the count of ten.

  “How about a little drink before I put you on that bus,” said Siedler, realising that he had made some kind of a boo-boo, changing the subject rapidly, and producing another bottle of Old Hickory which he had been clutching ostentatiously behind his back. “How about that? Hickory for Chicory.” He caught sight of the TV screen. “And man do I go for Yogi Bear. Just look at that.” Siedler went off into gusts of mirth as the popular bear once more outwitted the ranger at Jellystone Park. He stood for a full minute, oblivious to everything else, transfixed by the antics of the cartoon characters. Beysie finally detached the bottle from a limp hand and carted it over to the dressing table.

  He was about to pour the drinks when a bell boy arrived bearing an unexpected gift. The parcel was for Boysie—large, oblong, flat and beautifully packaged.

  “Christmas already?” said Siedler as Boysie placed the interesting object on the table.

  “Who the hell’s sending parcels to me here?” Boysie felt an initial intuitive nip of danger. Siedler was behind him.

  “Wait a minute, boy. Careful with that thing. You can never tell—specially if someone’s gunning for you. Better let me get it down to headquarters. You know, after last night’s caper. They’ll get the Bomb Squad on to it.”

  “There’s a card on top,” said the observant Chicory.

  Boysie removed the envelope from beneath its cellotape binding, slit it open and took out a square, gilt-edged card. The writing was in that round, characterless hand much favoured by the upper-bracket girls’ schools along the Roedean and Cheltenham circuit.

  Got your address from the Cunard people, it read. Hope this reaches you before you leave New York. A little gift for making me so happy. With my love ever. Priscilla.

  “Gosh,” burbled Boysie. “How jolly nice of her. Wonder what she’s sent?”

  “Who’s Priscilla?” said Chicory in a voice betraying the green-eyed monster which lurks in the hot recesses of every woman’s brain.

  “Oh, just a girl I met on the boat. Nobody important.” Boysie threw it off with an inexpert touch of nonchalance.

  “Hu!” She tossed her head and went over to study the view from the window as Boysie scrabbled with the outer wrapping.

  “You’re sure it’s OK?” asked Siedler, facing Boysie over the parcel.

  “This is all right. Girl on the boat. Hundred percenter. Jolly nice of her to have bothered.” Boysie preened like a birthday boy. The wrapping was off now, revealing an elegant long box, crested with the name of one of New York’s swankiest stores for men. He struggled to remove the lid—fingers all thumbs.

  “Here, let me help you with that.” Siedler pulled up on his side of the box, disclosing a first layer of tissue paper.

  Boysie and Siedler must have both realised the dreadful mistake at the same moment—just as the lid came free. Joe Siedler’s hand was outstretched over the tissue. He stood no chance. The tissue stirred and crackled, then seemed to burst upwards like an opening flower. The long, thin body flashed out from its paper retreat and streaked with lightning speed and grace, fastening its dripping little mouth hard on to Sielder’s wrist. He gave a shriek of terror. Boysie took a half step back then stopped, fascinated, screwed to the floor, hands paralysed with horror. Chicory turned and began to scream, a forearm thrown across her face as though in defence. The revolting, deadly fangs of the eight-foot black mamba had closed tightly and were relentlessly pumping venom into Siedler’s bloodstream. For a moment he did not move, his eyes dilated, all senses fixed on the hot pulse of pain and awful crawling sensation. Then, with an almost listless downward jerk of the arm, Siedler shook the brute free and fell back on the bed, moaning and clutching his arm. The snake flicked its soft green-black body —sending the box flying—rolled on to the floor with a slithery thump, then seemed to leap forward, its length whipping out so that the tail almost touched Chicory’s feet by the window. The snake’s tiny eyes gleamed above the darting tongue. For a second it seemed to be making up its mind which way to turn; then, head slightly raised, it made an effortless rise on to the bed and began to glide like an arrow towards Boysie.

  The mamba is one of the world’s most dangerous and aggressive snakes. It is also one of the fastest. In Africa they tell stories about good runners being overtaken by a mamba on the hunt. Boysie felt the hair on his neck stand erect. But the nervous, inbred instinct for self-preservation, and those few seconds which Siedler had taken to throw the snake from his wrist, gave Boysie just enough time to go through a standard reaction. The little pearl-handled pistol was out. He experienced that terrifying flip-roll of his stomach and saw the blurred head of the nauseating creature speeding over the bed coming straight for him.

  His third shot caught the snake in the head—the other two went thudding into the bed, close to where Siedler lay moaning. A fourth bullet entered the middle of the reptile’s pliable body. It reared up, then dropped writhing and lashing in a death fury to the floor. Boysie, trembling with terror, hung on to the table. Chicory was screaming. At that moment the door crashed open and the two policemen slammed into the room, their M1911/A automatics at the ready.

  *

  The groaning had stopped, and Chicory’s hysteria was now reduced to a whisper. One of the men was talking urgently into the telephone. The other, who had been applying a makeshift tourniquet to Siedler’s arm, suddenly raised himself from the stooping position over the bed. A choking sound came from Siedler’s throat. Boysie saw him twitch twice, and watched the white bubble of foam come slavering from his lips. Siedler took two great gulps of air, then seemed to deflate, his head falling loosely on to the pillow.

  “Joe’s not goin’ to need the antivenom, nor a doctor,” said the cop to his colleague. “Musta been the shock, or his heart. Poison wouldn’t have worked that quick.”

  The other man went on talking into the telephone. Boysie looked down at the still, ashen figure of Joe Siedler. He felt numb and his bowels had turned watery. Through the confused and shocked thoughts, jumbled in his mind, Boysie reflected that he was a natural Jonah: a magnet for violence: a carrier of death. This kind of thing had happened before. He remembered a villa in Southern France, and a young girl’s body spurting its lifeblood over the bonnet of a car, and the corpses of nearly thirty people whose deaths he had caused—one way or another—since the day when smooth Mostyn had offered him a post with the Department of British Special Security. Now, the gay, friendly Joe Siedler, whom he had met only a few hours before, lay dead; two tiny swelling punctures in his wrist.

  “He’s not ...?” Chicory looked up, her dark eyes ringed with the puff of tears.

  Boysie nodded and went over to her. She clutched his hand, her fingers moving against his in the nervous caress of fear.

  “Who are you?” she asked, frightened and low.

  “Boysie Oakes,” he whispered. “A bloody leper.”

  “OK, there ain’t much more you can do here.” The policeman had put down the telephone. “We’ve got
ta get you on your way, fast as we can. The lady would like to freshen up a bit first?”

  Chicory nodded and went slowly, trembling, to the bathroom.

  “Joe was a great guy,” said the other cop.

  “A great-hearted guy,” said his colleague. “Mr Oakes, I guess we ought to get a few details straightened out.”

  Boysie answered their questions about the arrival of the parcel, the character and connections of Miss Priscilla Braddock-Fairchild, and the actual events which had filled the room with half a minute of terror. Together, they examined the box in which the horrific gift had arrived. It was lined with a kind of protective foil—which retained unpleasant traces of the former occupant. The reptile had been coiled securely, obviously by an expert, between a series of forked prongs set in a spiral at the bottom of the box. The lid contained similar prongs. The snake—which they had pushed carefully into a corner and covered with a sheet—had, presumably, been drugged and fitted snugly into its lair, where it had lain, immobile, until the dope had worn off and the lid was lifted to free it to the attack.

  “Nice-minded sort of character who thought this one up,” said the cop as Chicory rejoined them. “OK, Mr Oakes? Miss Triplehouse?” He looked briskly at his watch. “Time to get moving. Joe’s office say they’ll be keeping an eye on you, and that you’ll be moved off the bus at the first opportunity. We got some of their boys coming over to square the hotel and get things done nice for Joe.”

  “He was a great guy,” mused the other man. “A regular guy.”

  They took Boysie and Chicory out of the hotel, by a back exit, to a stunned and silent Avallon who drove them through the hot blaring streets to the crowded Port Authority Bus Terminal. The big, air-conditioned Scenicruiser growled out into Dyer Avenue, bound for Los Angeles, dead on noon.

  “Ya change buses at Flagstaff, Arizona—that’ll be day after tomorrow,” the driver had said examining their tickets.

  Boysie and Chicory, leaning back in their comfortable airline-type seats, held hands and wordlessly tried to wipe from their minds the picture of Joe Siedler’s face contorted by fear and anguish as the great slim snake clung to his arm. As the bus turned down the ramp into the Lincoln Tunnel, heading towards the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the full dimensions of what had happened suddenly rammed home into Boysie’s whirling mind. He felt unclean, as he always did when death moved near to him. The black mamba had been meant for him. By rights it should be him, and not Joe Siedler, lying in a mortuary, cold and rigid as frozen meat. For once he seemed to be facing the situation with relative calm. Shock had pushed out panic. But those clear blue eyes gleamed hard and the left corner of his mouth jerked up in the reflex which was almost his trademark. Both were signs of the ingrained fear, which Boysie Oakes had to fight nearly every day of his life.

  At the same moment, the skull-faced youth was standing in a telephone booth in the big, glistening babel that is the New York Port Authority Bus Terminal.

  “Yea, kid, we just heard,” said Cirio at the other end of the line. “Thanks, kid. You’d better come on over here. We all got work to do.”

  In his office at the Club Fondante Cirio put down the telephone and gazed across the desk at a disconsolate Ritzy.

  “You’re the boss,” he said—sort of snide.

  “Yea. I’d better call head office,” said Ritzy.

  *

  Mostyn was just about to leave the headquarters building off Whitehall when his secretary brought in the decoded cable from USS One: the Department’s undercover man in New York. Mostyn was a very worried man. The signal, now on the desk in front of him, read:

  ONE ATTEMPT TO ABDUCT ONE TO LIQUIDATE ‘L’ YOUR DEPUTY OBSERVER PLAYBOY AND TREPHOLITE TRIALS STOP CIA ESCORT KILLED STOP ‘L’ AND OUR FEMALE ESCORT NOW EN ROUTE STOP ADVISE STOP

  Mostyn felt lonely. His intuition had been right again. The final word, ‘ADVISE’ winked at him hysterically from the paper. The ball had been pitched firmly into his court. Somehow Boysie was in it again. Right up to his neck. “Hope to God he’s got his brown suit on,” muttered Mostyn as he picked up the direct line telephone to the Chief.

  The Chief had already left. Mostyn got through to the Duty Officer. “Number Two here.” He spoke rapidly, his senses alert to the urgency which, presumably, lay behind the cable. “Get me the Chief. Top Priority.”

  *

  In the middle of the afternoon they stopped, along the Turnpike, at the Howard Johnson restaurant near Mechanicsville—a regulation building of clean stone with a slate roof. It reminded Boysie a little of the quiet afternoon he had spent in the Cotswolds on his last leave. Elizabeth, the girl who had been with him then, was very different from Chicory, and his world far more peaceful. They ate Mr Johnson’s celebrated Southern Fried Chicken (which tastes not unlike his American Baked Ham—so fine is the art of cutting the highs and lows off the taste spectrum) and French Fries, washing the meal down with scalding coffee. The whole business took only twenty indigestible minutes. Then, rest stop over, the bus grumbled its way out on to the ribbon of tarmac once more.

  Night closed in and the bus ploughed into the neon jungle of advertising which is the unnatural scenery of the Eastern States: Piggly-Wiggly Stores, Go TWA, Shop at Schneiders, El Rancho, Bar-B-Q, He’ll be Safe With Jukey’s—Best Morticians in Town. Indianapolis went by unnoticed in the early hours, and when they woke the view was of the long tobacco fields, elegant clapboard houses and high barns of Indiana.

  Throughout the day they chatted in fragments, Boysie shifting the conversation over to Chicory’s past whenever the talk came dangerously near to his own. By the time they reached Springfield, Missouri, he had heard about her childhood in Joplin (Springfield made her nostalgic), home-made cookies, wire teeth braces, pigtails (all part of the great American saga, thought Boysie: Andy Hardy and all that jazz). After Springfield there were the more interesting, and undoubtedly more glamorous, tales of New York and the model racket; then the wealthy husband who, after a two-year idyll with Chicory, had walked off with a counter assistant from Woolworths, called Ophelia Cocks. Thus Chicory reverted to her maiden name of Triplehouse and accepted the wayward husband’s sizeable alimony.

  “Now,” she said with a pout, mimicking a hick accent, “I’m nuthin’ more’n a bored pussy, holdin’ off the tom cats and keepin’ out of the kitten way.”

  Night again, and the conversation petered out in fitful sleep. Boysie’s mind clicked back to New York: the abortive attempt to entice him from the hotel, and the subtle horror of the mamba. Try as he would, the pictures kept returning, shouldering their way into his dozing thoughts. The conclusion was always the same. Behind this seemingly simple operation, there lurked that old last enemy, death. Twice in New York. They would not let it go at that. There was purpose and method behind the two attempts. Sometime, soon, they would have another go. Boysie swallowed, and allowed his hand to stray to the satisfyingly hard butt of the pistol in his hip pocket. Third time lucky? It was all Mostyn’s fault. It was always Mostyn’s fault. Boysie began his favourite pastime of silently cursing his Second-in-Command.

  They slept a little and woke in Tulsa (“This is the place that chap was twenty-four hours from,” said Boysie. Chicory giggled), again in Oklahoma City, and once more in Amarillo, Texas, where the crickets were singing fit to snap their tiny wings. Sleep again, a little deeper, and at six in the morning, with the sun rising over the spectacular desert, the Scenicruiser pulled up in front of the Posting House Cafe, Santa Rosa, New Mexico.

  “You gotta nour here, folks,” said the driver.

  Yawning and stretching, the bleary passengers lurched stiffly towards their respective rest rooms—cutely labelled “Señors” and “Señoritas”—and allowed the gastric juices to flow unimpeded at the thought of breakfast served by raven-sleek Spanish-American beauties who could be glimpsed behind the restaurant counters.

  The water was cold, the other male passengers bawdy and loud. It reminded Boysie of army days; freezing in the ablut
ions surrounded by false heartiness. He never could shave with cold water, and performed the operation painfully, cutting himself twice and drying the blood with little pieces of toilet paper. His tingling Onyx after-shave lotion stung more than usual; there was a very rude drawing, accompanied by an Anglo-Saxon word, etched on the lavatory wall. “Just like home,” murmured Boysie, realising that his travelling companions had all shaved, shined their shoes, and done the other thing at the double. They were now probably wolfing all the remaining hotcakes, crispy cereals, bacon, sunnyside-up eggs and coffee. He packed his shaving gear back into the neat green Lentheric Onyx de Luxe travel kit and—after taking one last look at his parting in the cracked mirror—turned towards the door.

  “Mr Oakes?” The man spoke conspiratorially, leaning against the wall outside the rest room. He looked nattily expensive, his chin barbered as though someone had plucked out each hair independently by the roots and then given the skin a going over with varnish. Boysie stared into a pair of eyes which commanded attention. At first sight this was not the kind of man with whom Boysie felt an instinctive kinship.

  “Yes?” Boysie’s hand prepared to move towards his hip pocket. The man’s right hand came forward and flipped open a leather identity wallet. Boysie caught sight of a badge and official-looking card.

  “Henniger,” said Henniger. “United States Security. Have your breakfast with the girl, collect your baggage from the bus, and meet us at the car out in back. Red Mustang convertible.”

  “Thank God for that,” said Chicory, her mouth full of hotcake and syrup, when Boysie told her. “I’ve just about had that bus. Or I should say it’s just about had me. Those seats on your tail! Yow!”

  The car was parked at the rear of the Cafe—the sun, already climbing with all systems ‘Go’ on a smooth trajectory, reflecting in a bonnet which looked hygenically clean. Henniger made no move to help Boysie as he humped his Revelation, and Chicory’s lightweight case, over the few yards of parking lot. Behind the wheel sat a tall lean man with grey well-toned hair and glasses.