The Girl With the Jade Green Eyes (21 page)

Slade pulled an ordinary cigarette lighter from his pocket and flicked its lever. It didn’t light, but a klaxon blasted somewhere in the building and the riflemen on the opposite roof leaped to their feet. Slade flicked the lighter again and the klaxon sounded twice. The men across the patio settled back down.

“That was a drill. When you sound it, it’ll not be a drill. If you hear a thump on the balcony followed by two quick thuds, don’t look. Sound the beeper. If Fawn’s accent sounds a little off, sound the beeper. We’ll not criticize you for being too quick on the trigger. Out of respect for your privacy, and Kyra’s, I’ll keep the television monitors out of your quarters if you’ll carry the beeper.”

“Of course, Slade. I’ll be glad to carry it.”

“Good, and when you sound it, I’ll know Huan Chung is here.”

“Tell me, Slade, who is this Huan Chung?”

“Who is Huan Chung?” Slade repeated the question slowly, rhetorically, his shoulders slumping forward into his storyteller’s stance. Breedlove detected a slight movement in the erstwhile immobile balcony guards. They were leaning forward to catch every word of Slade’s story.

“Huan Chung,” Slade’s tale began, “happens to be the most fantastic character in the history of espionage. More insidious than Fu Manchu, a greater hypnotist than Doctor Lao, his symbol is the black lotus. He leaves the black lotus behind him as sort of a calling card, but it is part of his mystique never to use a cover name. Whenever he registers at a hotel, it’s always as ‘Mr. and Mrs. Huan Chung,’ for reasons I’ll soon make clear.

“His only known legitimate hobby is the practice of parlor magic, mostly sleight of hand or legerdemain, although he has perfected a less legitimate sleight of end or leger-de-derrière trick no other magician has ever duplicated. He has several other illicit hobbies, chief among them being to figure out new ways of dispatching his opponents. Mind you, I did not say ‘his enemies.’ Huan Chung kills with a creative flair, but there’s nothing personal about his artistry.

“Huan Chung was born—dropped rather—by a Commie female during the Long March. Some say his father was Chairman Mao, but he is the acknowledged son of no man. He was raised in a commune and at the age of six could recite the whole ‘Little Red Book.’ He’s such a dedicated Commie he chews ginseng root so he can pee red.

“He’s expert in every known method of killing a man, and there are several methods not yet published that he holds the copyright on. He has committed murder by suicide. In Hanoi once he hypnotized a French secret agent and had him commit hari-kari by autosuggestion on a stage before an audience. The fastidious little bastard was so confident of his powers as a hypnotist that he even provided a bowl for the Frenchman to disembowel himself into.

“An illusionist, he can merge into any background, emerge, strike, then fade away. He’s master of the diabolical plot and a genius at sinister intrigue, but that which makes Huan Chung the world’s greatest superspy is his mastery of the art of disguise. If you think Kyra is lovely, you should see Huan Chung gussied up as Mrs. Huan Chung. Kyra in her Polinski Creation is to Huan Chung in drag what Sammy Davis, Junior, is to Diahann Carroll.

“Back when I worked for the CIA, my man in Hong Kong once hired a Chinese stenographer, a petite, almond-eyed little babe built like a sandalwood outhouse. He fell in love with the Chinese doll and for three weeks the romance went along hot and heavy until the doll got the combination of his safe and made off with our Asian code books. In the safe where the code books had been, she left a memento, a black lotus.

“She was Huan Chung pulling his sleight-of-end trick. My man had been so diverted and beguiled between the sheets he never noticed that his Oriental nifty had balls. We had to lead him out of the cold by his hand. His career was ruined, but that did not bother him as much as his broken heart. He had fallen in love, and he never recovered from the fickleness and infidelity of Huan Chung, truly a master of disguise.”

The tale ended in a look of awe on the teller’s face, and Breedlove asked, “Aren’t you laying it on a little thick, Slade?”

“No. Hyperbole is understatement when you speak of Huan Chung… I want you to study these coconut trees, Breedlove. Count them. Notice their size and shape—”

“Wait a minute! You aren’t telling me—”

“I’m telling you Huan Chung is a contortionist. He can coil himself in a ball and disguise himself as a coconut until he’s ready to backflip onto the balcony. We’d better get in. I’ve got to break the news to the boys about their new visiting hours.”

Inside, Kyra had rummied, and the laughter, general gaiety, and the sunlight flooding the room made for anything but a dismal scene, yet it seemed to Breedlove that the tendrils of a fog were coiling into the room, that it was growing darker and clammier. Huan Chung had cast his shadow before him.

“Alone at last,” Kyra sighed as the door closed behind her bodyguard. “And not a minute too soon. I’ve got five hundred years of reading to catch up on.”

She strode to a cabinet now crammed with books, chose one, and returned to the sofa. Glancing over, Breedlove saw it was
Gone with the Wind
. She became engrossed in the book immediately, but as an object. Slowly turning the pages, she fingered the texture of the paper and admired the typeface and page layout. He sometimes did the same before reading a book.

Glancing toward the balcony, he was reassured by the thick necks of the guards, but only momentarily. A shadow flitted across the balcony, and he flinched, fearing the fall of a coconut and two quick snaps of breaking necks. But it was only Slade’s helicopter, now arriving overhead, which had passed before the sun.

“Breedlove, you’re worried,” she said, without looking up from the book. “What did Ben tell you on the balcony?”

“Just a story. Another one of his originals.”

“About Huan Chung?”

“Yes.”

“And what foo yong did Ben feed my Breedlove about Huan Chung?”

“Slade didn’t tell you, probably because he felt it might frighten you to no purpose, and I have to agree.”

“Oh, fiddle-de-dee! Y’all ought to know if I frightened easily I wouldn’t be here. More likely Ben didn’t tell me because he knows I know when he’s exaggerating. Now, tell me his tale, with all the embellishments.”

He told her the story, but he censored Slade’s comparison of her beauty with that of Huan Chung. When he finished the tale, she lifted her eyes from the book and asked, “Who is Sammy Davis, Junior?”

He told her.

“Is he pretty, witty, and vivacious?”

“Well, he’s witty and vivacious.”

He saw a hurt look in her eyes and rushed to change the subject. “Ben was just using an extreme figure of speech. He likes to impress me with those little verbal tricks. But if you overheard that on the balcony, did you hear what Cohen said to me in the hearing room?”

“Yes, and I think Cohen was right. You shouldn’t try to keep bad news from me. I need to know everything to take countermeasures.”

“If you think Cohen was right, why did you give Slade a vote of confidence when he said he’d get you away by next Friday?”

“That was a countermeasure. Ben is a man of wiles and I was ordering probabilities.” She dropped her eyes back to the book but kept talking to him in a thoughtful vein. “Breedlove, I think Ben created Huan Chung in his own image out of some deep psychic need of his own or to give his men an ideal of perfection in the spy business to strive for. He created Huan Chung from the same need for legendary heroes that made lumberjacks escape their own workaday world with Paul Bunyan or railroad men with Casey Jones.”

“You may be entirely right,” he agreed, surprised by her observation. “Slade probably borrowed Huan Chung from Sax Rohmer, a writer who created an insiduous but wholly fictional Doctor Fu Manchu, another Oriental spymaster.”

She nodded with the pleased, agreeing nod of a schoolteacher complimenting her favorite student. “As many actors have, Ben has an identity problem, and Ben is an actor, perhaps the greatest natural actor since Richard Burbage, but unfortunately he studied dramatics with the CIA. So don’t listen too attentively to everything he says. I wouldn’t put it past him to try and frighten you, because he’s afraid you might want to fly the coop with me some night and take me dancing at Pierre’s. Believe me, I’d be willing, and it would be perfectly safe. If Huan Chung exists, he couldn’t capture me. My evolutionary training would help me avoid the grasp of any man I don’t want grabbing me… By the way, did Slade tell you I wanted to cut back on our socializing?”

“He told me he was going to give you more privacy.”

“Let him have the credit for the idea, but I don’t want Laudermilk bursting into the room at all hours without knocking, and I’m not ready for deification by Little Richard. I declare, they do get tiresome, and if we can’t go dancing at Pierre’s tonight, I want to spend a quiet evening at home with nothing but the backs of our two riflemen for company. Unfortunately we have to make an appearance in the dining room… Breedlove, were you ever on Peachtree Street in Atlanta?”

“No. I’m sorry.”

Her reference was to
Gone with the Wind
. She wasn’t leafing through it, she was reading it while carrying on a conversation with him, and now she lapsed into silence. Outside, the sound of laughter drifted up from the poolside, and he ignored the sounds, watching her face as she slowly turned the pages. He was seeing a mime show of sadness, mirth, and occasionally the misty-eyed yearnings of romance played out on her face. Fascinated at first by her expressiveness, he slowly began to feel like a voyeur.

Trying not to disturb her concentration, he arose and started from the room, intending to join in the merriment below, but without looking up, she asked, “Are you going down to quaff the nut-brown ale and old?”

“Yes. Care to join me?”

“No. I’m going to finish this terrific story and read
War and Peace
. Gravy recommended it.”

Below, he found her three guardsmen at a poolside table and joined them. In the pool were several lithely muscled women. “You’re allowing females on the premises,” he said to Slade.

“They’re all cooks and waitresses,” Slade said, “but most of those dolls have earned black belts, so don’t make any sudden moves in their direction.”

“Speaking of dolls,” Laudermilk said, “did I tell you about the fräulein I met in Dresden?”

As a storyteller, Breedlove discovered, Slade had a rival in Laudermilk, although the major’s repertoire was limited to bedroom stories. Yet despite the graphic details they were told with a verve and enthusiasm that lifted them above the merely salacious and claimed even the polite attention of Turpin. In addition, Laudermilk’s detached sense of wonder and artistic appreciation suggested a motivating impulse behind his amours as objective as that of a collector of any exotic erotica, such as Mayan fertility symbols. Some of his lectures were illustrated. He divided women into two categories, good and better, and the latter group he divided into squeezers, twisters, and snappers. The greatest of these were the snappers.

Next to his heart he carried a billfold with a plastic foldout designed for credit cards but carrying photographs of girls, some so young and virginal-looking Breedlove found it difficult to imagine them involved in liaisons without creating statutory problems. The queen of Laudermilk’s “pussy pantheon” was an Italian snapper with the face of an Eleonora Duse.

“Her professional name was Beatrice del Amores, but I called her ‘the Living End.’ She walked with the same twisting sway of Kyra—

“Leave Kyra out of this, Laudermilk!” Turpin blurted in anger.

Slade and Laudermilk glance at the former FBI operative, who seemed suddenly ashamed of his outburst. He continued in a softer tone, “I don’t want to sound strait-laced, Major, but Kyra’s above this sort of talk.”

With fatherly understanding Laudermilk nodded and continued in a sprightly, ruminative tone. “Talking about strait-laced people, I met this pious little thing down around Ben’s country, a choir singer in the Midlands Baptist Tabernacle. She was reverent and modest but built like a Gothic cathedral with a flying buttress that would have made Christopher Wren envious. She had developed this pelvic movement she called ‘the Born-Again Bounce,’ and—”

“Dang it, Laudermilk. You’re just pulling my leg.”

So passed the lazy afternoon, the major regaling them with tales from his latter-day Decameron while the woman who could have given him an unbeatable record as a sexualist finished reading
Gone with the Wind
and commenced
War and Peace
before going down to dinner.

Though he was attentive to Laudermilk’s tales, Slade’s eyes kept flicking toward the entrances to the patio, toward the opposite roof, and once he craned his neck to look up at the coconuts on the tree under which they sat. It was then that Breedlove began to wonder again about Slade’s sanity, wonder if his peculiar profession had so warped his sense of reality that he had come to believe his own yarns.

With the commencement of Kyra’s restriction to the motel, Breedlove entered reluctantly a Cloud-Cuckoo-Land of secret agents he considered strictly for The Birds. However personable the men around Kyra might be, he was convinced their attitude was a product of aberrant minds, and to escape momentarily from their influence, to give Kyra solitude for her concentration, and to store up eyewitness accounts of the world outside to relate to her, he began to take walks through the surrounding neighborhood. Along the tree-lined sidewalks he saw nothing more Oriental than a Siamese cat, which he photographed for Kyra. The helicopter, whose maddening drone constantly overhead added its bit to their boredom inside, seemed to follow him in his walks, and he knew he could be under surveillance from the machine. It was not beyond Slade to suspect him of being a double agent—or Huan Chung in disguise.

Once he returned from a walk to find Kyra seated on the side of her bed, gazing wistfully at her favorite dress spread before her. In the pathos of the moment he would have risked the wrath of Slade and spirited her on an outing if they could have eluded the cordon around her stucco castle keep.