Operation Breakthrough (4 page)

“Can we talk here, Candy?”

“Jus’ soon’s I take care of this,” he said promptly. He slammed the bolts back into position after closing the door. I could see that the door itself was three or four panels thick and had metal plate screwed to the inside. “Like to be able to control who walks in an’ out’ve here of an evenin',” Candy continued with a wink.

His eyes were red rimmed, and he wasn’t articulating too well, but he didn’t sound drunk. From somewhere in the background my nostrils picked up a trace of the sweetness of marijuana. Candy leaned back until his broad shoulders were resting upon the closed door. He wasn’t tall, but he was remarkably thick through the body without being at all fat. “So?” he said expectantly.

“I need a place to stay. Unofficially.”

There was no change in his expression, but the red-rimmed eyes examined me more carefully. “How long?”

I had been about to say twenty-four hours. The sight of Candy’s security arrangements, though, had triggered a new line of thought. “Not more than three or four days.”

“What you runnin’ from?”

“The law.”

“Mainland?”

“Local.”

He cocked an eyebrow. “How’d you git crossways locally? Well, never mind. How you gonna git off the island?”

“It’s all arranged.”

He considered the implications of that for a moment, sucking air through a gap in his strong-looking white teeth. “It don’t seem to be a real problem,” he said at last.

“You hold your games here?”

He nodded. “But I’ve an extra room I can slip you into, an’ nobody’ll know you’re around. Nobody that’d bother you.”

“You don’t sound as British as some I’ve heard around here,” I suggested. “Roy, for instance.”

Candy grinned again. “I worked six years in Miami. Stick man for a casino crap game.”

“Why don’t the police bother you here?”

He rubbed a thumb and forefinger together.
“Baksheesh
. It gets me by so long as I don’t go after the high rollers headin’ for the casino.” He moved away from the door. “C’mon inside an’ meet the girls.”

“Girls?”

But he was already beyond the entranceway and striding into the room beyond.

I followed.

It was like another world.

The room was large, and it gave the immediate impression of being one into which sunlight never penetrated. Heavy draperies shielded all the windows. Flickering candles in ornate holders supplied the only light. Joss sticks burned beside the candles, and the odor of incense eddied through the room, combined with the aroma of pot.

Low couches displaying pastel fabrics were the room’s predominant items of furniture. There were no chairs. Lacquered screens were set carelessly at odd angles. The rug was deep pile, and in the center of the surprising room, incongruously enough, was a full-sized gymnasium mat of the type used by wrestlers.

“This chappie is a friend of mine, girls,” Candy announced. “His name is Earl. Say hello, Chen Yi.”

A girl rose from a petal-pink couch. And rose and rose and rose. She was barefooted but still towered six inches above Candy and me. She was Chinese with long, straight, black hair framing a beautiful face. There is nothing in the world as black as a Chinese girl’s hair.

There was a lot more of the girl bare than her feet, because her costume consisted solely of a choke-collared, Russian-style blouse that ended at her waist. I looked at her, looked away, then looked back again. Her body was spectacular. “Hello, Earl,” she said softly.

“Hi,” I returned weakly.

“An’ this bit of fluff is Consuelo,” Candy went on. He pointed to another couch where a brown-haired girl was reclining. She was smoking a water pipe, and her pupils were dilated. Consuelo was almost as Spanish looking as her name except that her eyes were slanted like a Polynesian’s, and her skin tone was almond rather than
café au lait
. It wasn’t hard to make the analysis since her attire consisted of one hundred percent less material than that of Chen Yi, the Chinese girl. Consuelo waved languidly from her couch. I waved back.

“An’ Hermione,” Candy said, pulling aside a lacquered screen. A third girl stared up at me from a supine position on a third couch, her doe eyes glazed with a marijuana euphoria. She was a flaxen blonde, a butterball of a girl with the high facial coloring and flawless pale skin associated with English mists and moors. She was wearing a terrycloth towel like Candy’s and a dreamy smile. Her taut nipples were strawberry splashes against the creamy expanse of her tip-tilted breasts.

“How about a spot of cheer?” Candy asked me.

I started to refuse, then thought better of it. A cold-sober approach to life seemed too wildly at variance with the relaxed attitudes in this extraordinary room. “Brandy, if you have it. And thanks.”

“Chen Yi,” Candy said.

The tall girl went to a cabinet near one wall and took down a bottle of brandy. I estimated her height at four inches above six feet. I could see that the brandy was Metaxa. Chen Yi poured liberally into a bell-shaped snifter. I couldn’t remove my gaze from the broad acreage of her fully disclosed ivory buttocks.

“A joint?” Candy inquired.

“Not right now,” I evaded the issue. So far I’ve managed to get my kicks in life without employing Mary Jane.

“We were jus’ workin’ out,” Candy continued with a nod at the gymnasium mat. “Burns out the poisons. Slide onto a couch. We’ll talk more later. C’mon, Chen Yi.”

Hermione, the blonde, patted the couch beside herself invitingly. I sat down, lowering myself cautiously until I found myself barely a foot above the luxuriant carpeting, careful not to spill the fine Greek brandy. At the first sip its warmth traveled from my throat to my stomach so rapidly it reminded me it was quite a few hours since I’d eaten.

Candy stepped onto the gym mat wearing only his loosely knotted towel. Chen Yi advanced to meet him, still clad in her abbreviated high-necked blouse. Candy was a bear of a man, built close to the ground. He faced the girl with his legs apart in a semicrouched position with his weight on the balls of his feet. His hands rested lightly on his thighs. I had taken judo instruction once, and I recognized the stance as judo’s main defensive posture, the
jigo-hontai
.

The Chinese girl confronted Candy drawn up to her full height, her arms slightly away from her body. This was the
shizen-hontai
, judo’s so called natural posture. She charged Candy suddenly, attempting to unbalance him, but he took her down with a classic knee wheel that rolled her completely over.

While on the mat she did something with her feet, too quick for me to follow anything except smoothly rippling muscles in thighs and buttocks. Candy sprawled heavily beside her, and they both sprang to their feet and faced off again in reverse postures.

A touch on my thigh brought my head around as I took another swallow of brandy. Hermione’s towel had disappeared completely, and she was snuggling closer to me. I slipped an arm around her, and the silky skin of her waist titillated my fingertips. The bushy triangle of her body hair was as blond as her head. “Where are you from?” she asked drowsily.

“Washington,” I said. It was the first thing that came into my head, and it was true enough since Erikson and I had taken off from Andrews Field.

A thudding sound drew my attention to the mat again. I drank brandy and watched the strange contest. Candy and Chen Yi took turns on offense and defense. He may have been stronger, but not by much, and she was quicker. She appeared to have enormous strength in her hands and upper body. She was even better at the
hiza-guruma
, the knee wheel, than Candy was. Both worked hard at attempting to get the opponent off-balance before trying to apply their own holds. The flying black and yellow bodies crashed to the mat in almost equal ratios.

I knew the brandy was getting to me when the ebony-and-gold ballet on the mat started to blur at the edges. And the conditions of the contest seemed to have changed. I leaned forward to see better. Instead of judo’s freewheeling throws Candy and Chen Yi were working in close to each other. Arm movements were short and choppy, and both seemed to be holding back. I had never seen anything like it before.

I felt a tugging at my waist. I had slumped back without realizing it, and Hermione had my shoes off and was working on my pants. I felt marvelously relaxed, but then a slight crackling sound beneath my jacket reminded me I still had Erikson’s sack. I set my snifter down on the floor while I captured Hermione’s roving hands. She pouted attractively and after a moment left the couch.

Chen Yi appeared beside me and refilled my brandy glass. She was slick with perspiration, and her heavy breathing agitated the full breasts — much fuller than Hermione’s even — beneath her blouse. When I started to speak to her, I found I had to shape the words carefully. My lips felt slack. “What was that you two were doing at the end, Chen Yi?”

“That is
gung fu,”
she answered. “It is not play.”

I had never heard of
gung fu
, but I made a mental note to learn more. Chen Yi departed. Somewhere in the background I could hear a shower running. I picked up the brandy snifter and sampled its contents again, savoring the quick spreading warmth.

Muffled giggles drew my attention to the wrestling mat again. Consuelo and Hermione, both nude, were wrestling in one corner of it. There was no science to it, merely kittenish exuberance as the soft bodies writhed and strained together. The emphasis was purely sexual. Or impurely.

Candy Kane had materialized again. He sat cross-legged at the edge of the mat, a brooding black figure with a haze of marijuana smoke wreathed around his head. I could see white scar ridges on his powerful looking forearms that could have been nothing except the residue of knife fights. Chen Yi was nowhere in sight.

For the first time since I’d been in the room no one was paying any attention to me. I unbuttoned my jacket and lifted off the cord to the canvas sack from around my neck. I quickly stuffed the sack under a couch cushion. It was so far from being bulky that I wondered again if Erikson had really obtained his goal.

I took another swallow of brandy before I sank back upon the couch, my eyes along with Candy’s upon the naked wrestlers.

Erikson …

I was going to have to do something about Karl Erikson.

One of the girls on the mat squealed shrilly, reclaiming my attention.

Then the nude wrestlers gradually went out of focus, and I didn’t see anything.

I came to with a start.

Hermione had returned to my couch.

Her sleek nudity was plastered full length atop my own. I couldn’t imagine where my clothes had gone. My nostrils were filled with the commingled odor of hyacinth, sandalwood, perspiration, and woman.

Hermione removed the empty brandy glass from my lax hand, then murmured something unintelligible as her fingertips traced the outline of the numerous scars on my chest from the skin transplants which had contributed to the remaking of my face. I reached down and secured a double handful of resilient gluteal amplitudes while Hermione continued to recline upon me. I kneaded her soft flesh until she turned her head with an impatient whimper and sank her sharp little teeth into my neck.

I cuffed her, and she rolled off onto the floor, dragging me with her. Our positions were reversed, which she seemed to consider an improvement. I wasn’t so sure. The long night’s effort and the brandy had induced a lassitude which made me doubt my response.

But Hermione had no doubts. Despite my weight upon her she performed prodigies of acrobatic movement with her pelvis as the fulcrum. She agitated me until a fleshy linchpin connected us, and her wide hips rose clear of the floor in her eagerness to meet and return each thrust.

It seemed to go on for a long time. I had the feeling at times that I was riding out a storm. The girl was a natural force. In my alcoholic haze the eventual climax felt like jumping from the haymow in a tall, tall barn.

I went plunging down and down and down and down.

And out.

I woke with a jerk and sat up abruptly.

I was back on the couch in the exotically furnished room.

Stubby candles still furnished the room’s only light, and the lingering odor of incense and marijuana still remained in the air. But there was no gymnasium mat in the center of the floor and no naked female bodies entwined upon it.

And no Hermione.

I wondered if I had dreamed it all.

My mouth tasted foul enough from the brandy residue to make me feel that an alcoholic dream was far from an impossibility. But Candy Kane had been no dream. I was sure of that.

The apartment’s airlessness, the brandy, and the uneasy sleep had combined to leave me well stewed in my own juices. I levered myself upright from the low couch and went in search of the bathroom from which I had heard the sound of running water.

En route I padded barefoot to the nearest window and pushed aside the elaborate draperies. Bright sunlight blinded me momentarily while I fumbled for the latch on the steel frame casement windows. I shoved them open and breathed deeply of the warm, flower scented air.

I squinted over the roofs of the single-story shops across the street and down the slope toward the waterfront. Just beyond Bay Street and Rawson Square I could see a huge white cruise ship moored against the Prince George Wharf, its gleaming superstructure in sharp contrast to the red tile roof of the customs building next to it.

The sound of wheels drew my attention to the narrow lane below. A policeman in a white tunic, his brown face made darker by the shade afforded by the broad rim of his gold-spiked pith helmet, pedaled leisurely along the empty cobblestoned street. The red stripes running down the seams of his black trousers made psychedelic patterns as his polished shoes rotated to propel his bicycle.

I drew back and pulled the draperies together.

The sight of the policeman was sobering.

I found the bathroom and turned on the shower. I soaped and rinsed myself several times to rid myself of accumulated skin film. But my thoughts kept returning to Karl Erikson incarcerated in a Bahamian jail cell.