Touchfeather

by Jimmy Sangster

  I told him what he could do with his open line and something of my misery must have communicated itself to him, because when I ran out of anything more insulting to say, he still hadn’t hung up.

  ‘You’re obviously upset about something,’ he said, with sparkling insight. ‘You will be contacted before midday tomorrow. Until then, stay in your hotel room, and talk to no one.’

  I said a rude word to him, but he had already hung up. There had been no point in asking him if he knew what had happened to Bill. If there was any way of knowing, then he already knew it, and if he didn’t want to volunteer the information, there was no way on earth that I could get it out of him. Apart from that, I knew enough about the ways of the world he and I moved in to want to remain ignorant; it could only have been something terrible, and my heart was bleeding sufficiently already without twisting the knife in the wound. I took three sleeping pills, which knocked me out as efficiently as a pole axe, and it was ten in the morning before I emerged from a completely dreamless sleep.

  As I swam to the surface, the whole thing came back to me with the force of a steam hammer. But while I had been sleeping, my body mechanism had been working hard. The agony I had been through had been gathered together and locked away in a small compartment reserved for such material. There was still pain, but it no longer washed over the whole spectrum of my mind; it was confined to one small area where it could be controlled. This is a facility which is a direct result of my work and my training. Pain, both physical and mental, cannot be allowed to clutter up the smooth working of the machine which I am supposed to be; it must be quickly classified and then stored away in the memory banks where it can be referred to occasionally, but only when the machine considers it necessary.

  So, dry-eyed now, I climbed out of bed and started to get ready for the day ahead. I sent a chambermaid out to buy me some new clothes, and then I gave her the sari because she looked as though she wanted it. The loss of it would appear on my records the next time I was required to fly Air India, but I couldn’t have cared less at the moment. And, as I lay in the tub, I realised that I was already thinking in the terms of ‘the next time I fly Air India’. More basically, this meant that I had no intention of giving up my job in spite of what I had said over the phone to Mr. Blaser. There is a certain comfort in continuity, and the best way to stop myself from re-ascending the heights of misery was to continue doing what I had done in the past. I was even rational enough to hope suddenly that I hadn’t burned my bridges with Mr. Blaser. I’d said some pretty strong things to him last night, and he didn’t like his people to get emotional; it clouded their judgment, he said. Still, there was no point in worrying about it at the moment. I’d know soon enough. I climbed out of the bath and dressed in the new clothes I’d ordered. Then I sat down to wait.

  At eleven forty-five the phone rang. Would I be kind enough to come to the offices of the Ariadne Import and Export Company on the Via Veneto. I confirmed that I would be there in twenty minutes and hung up. I stuffed my passport and papers into my new handbag and went to keep my appointment.

  Ariadne Imp. and Ex. was housed in two small offices above one of the better known cafes on the Via Veneto. It took me twenty minutes to walk there through the midday Rome traffic. Arriving, I reported to Signor Bertelli, whom I had met before and who never failed to make a pass at me. I think he only did so because he felt that, as an Italian, it was expected of him. But obviously Mr. Blaser must have had words with him, because he leapt to his feet as soon as I was shown into the office, and proceeded to treat me with a charming old-world courtesy I didn’t think he knew existed. The hands I had learned to dodge relieved me politely of my handbag and then pushed a chair under me. He moved back to his desk and, sitting down, placed his fingertips together, elbows on the desk, and regarded me solemnly from sad, brown eyes. He sighed deeply a couple of times before speaking to me in Italian.

  ‘Poor Miss Touchfeather. Mr. Blaser is an admirable man, extremely knowledgeable and efficient. But he is an Englishman. What can he know of affairs of the heart?’

  Someone had been talking, I decided. Then I realised that I had done nothing to conceal my feelings for Bill and it could have been any one of half a dozen people who had reported back to Mr. Blaser. Apart from the contact in Bombay, it could have been someone else whose identity I didn’t even know. We worked in very tight, self-contained cells. Mr. Blaser liked it that way. It had been known for three people to be on the same job at the same time, each one believing he or she to be the only one. He acted on the assumption that the less we knew about each other the less chance there was of giving away a colleague. Basically this was a good premise, but it had been known to backfire. On one occasion I had been hit over the head, tied up and incarcerated in a dirty cellar for twenty-four hours by a fellow operative, who had thought I was a member of the opposition.

  But Bertelli was still talking. ‘It’s only someone like myself who can appreciate the suffering you must be enduring right now. Mr. Blaser sees people as cyphers, not as warm, passionate, hotblooded creatures who love and who are loved back.’ He sighed again. ‘Poor Miss Touchfeather. Poor, poor Miss Touchfeather.’

  I thought I had better put a stop to this before he got me going again. ‘You’re very kind and understanding, Signor Bertelli. But I’d rather not talk about it.’

  He looked uncomfortable suddenly and his hands started to move involuntarily, as though they didn’t know where to go. Finally he used his left hand to pin the right one down on the desktop. ‘I am terribly afraid that we must talk about it,’ he said. ‘It embarrasses me, but...’ His right hand tried to escape, but he recaptured it quickly. ‘You understand, I have no choice in the matter.’

  I nodded. ‘I understand, Signor Bertelli. You’re extremely thoughtful, and I am grateful.’

  He smiled sadly and, having received my absolution, he got right down to business. ‘Mr. Blaser would like a full report. You will fly to London this afternoon, as a passenger.’ He pushed a ticket across the desk towards me. ‘In the meantime I am to speak to him on the telephone and tell him anything that you feel he should know.’

  ‘Like what?’ I asked.

  Bertelli cleared his throat before continuing. ‘He wishes to know as soon as possible...He wishes to know whether...He would like to know...’ He stopped and started all over again. ‘Considering the nature of your relationship with Professor Partman, is there nothing you can tell us that we do not already know?’

  ‘Tell me what you already know, and I’ll see.’

  ‘We know that Professor Partman made no contact in Bombay and that he was taken off the aircraft at Cairo. Nothing more.’

  ‘There isn’t any more.’

  ‘But did he not tell you anything while you were... Did he not tell you anything?’

  All I could remember was that he had told me that he loved me, but that belonged to me alone and I wasn’t going to share it with Bertelli, or Mr. Blaser.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said flatly.

  ‘He gave you no clues as to the reason he was in Bombay?’

  ‘Of course he did,’ I said. ‘He was reading two of his scientific papers at the University.’

  Bertelli dismissed this with a wave of his right hand, which had somehow escaped. ‘That is what we have all been told,’ he said. ‘But it does not necessarily make it so.’

  ‘What other reason could there be?’ I asked, genuinely surprised.

  ‘Mr. Blaser had hoped that you would be able to tell us.’

  ‘Tell Mr. Blaser... No, I’ll tell him,’ I said, getting to my feet.

  ‘Tell him what, Miss Touchfeather?’ Bertelli’s eyes had gone cold suddenly, and he didn’t even look like an Italian any longer. I remembered a story I had heard about him, how during the war he had worked for the Italian Resistance and had personally done to death one of the Gestapo chiefs, along with the German’s wife and five children.

  ‘Tell him that whatever it was that Bill Partman’s unit wer
e working on is probably known to the other side by now. Tell him that the people who decided that a man with his knowledge should be allowed to travel to a place they were already suspicious of should have their heads examined. And tell him...’

  ‘Wait, Miss Touchfeather. Why are you so sure that Professor Partman will have given away the nature of his work?’

  ‘You didn’t see the bald man. I did. He looked efficient enough to...’

  ‘Bald man? What bald man?’

  ‘The one who was waiting for us at Cairo.’

  ‘Describe him to me, please.’

  I realised then that I hadn’t actually described him to anyone. In my earlier reports, made at the airport, I had just referred to the men who had hijacked us, not identifying any of them as individuals. I described him to Bertelli, not a very difficult task. Halfway through my description, he was reaching for his keys. By the time I had finished he had produced a file from his safe and, rather like a magician producing a rabbit from a hat, he reached into the file and flipped a photograph across the desk towards me. It didn’t take two looks to recognise the man from the Cairo airport.

  ‘Who is he?’ I asked.

  Bertelli shook his head and made clucking sounds. ‘He is a very dangerous man, very dangerous indeed.’

  ‘That much I know,’ I said. ‘But who is he?’

  ‘We don’t know his real name. We call him the Eunuch.’ That figured, I thought, remembering the size of the man and the timbre of his voice. ‘If the Eunuch was at Cairo, then you are probably right. Professor Partman would not have been able to resist him for long.’

  I was starting to feel a little sick; the office was far too hot and there was an overpowering smell of garbage leaking up through the rear window. ‘If there’s nothing more, Signor Bertelli, I’d like to go now.’

  He became all Italian again, leaping to his feet and rushing around to usher me out of the office, to the accompaniment of small bows, and with eyes that were sad once more. He kissed my hand courteously and even came downstairs to find me a taxi. It was lunchtime, and the city had curled up inside itself, leaving its carcass to be picked over by the tourists. Bertelli scuttled across the pavement to the head of the taxi rank and opened the door for me. He kissed my hand again as he passed me into the taxi. Then he leaned in the window.

  ‘Arrivederci, dear Miss Touchfeather. Please come to see me the next time you are in Rome. I will try to dispel some of your sadness.’

  He was beginning to revert to form, so I wound up the window and told the taxi driver to take me back to the hotel before Bertelli forgot himself sufficiently to climb in with me. It was only a five-minute drive back to the hotel, so after seven minutes I started to worry. I hadn’t paid any attention to our route and, looking out of the window, I realised I had no idea where we were. I leaned forward and tapped on the partition separating me from the driver. The stolid-looking head in the front remained facing forwards and I knew I was in trouble. There wasn’t much point in trying the door or window handles, but I tried them anyway. They were mechanically locked. So was the partition.

  I examined the contents of my handbag to see whether I had anything that could conceivably be of any use. But, unlike some of the glamorous agents of fiction, my lipstick wasn’t a small-calibre pistol and my compact wasn’t a two-way radio; both were useful if I wanted to look my best, but they weren’t going to be any use at this moment. My nail file was made out of thin wood and was just the thing for filing nails. My cigarette lighter was out of fuel. That exhausted my handbag. I felt down the sides of the seat and came up with a handful of dust. I groped around on the floor and got my hands dirty. There was nothing else for it. I settled back in my seat and just hoped that whoever was kidnapping me was going to be civilised enough not to want anything from me that I wasn’t going to be able to let him have.

  SIX

  We changed cars somewhere out on the Appian Way, about twenty minutes from the city. The taxi pulled off the main road and bumped along a rutted track for a few hundred yards. Then it stopped and, a moment later, the door was opened from the outside.

  ‘Hello, darling,’ said the American from the aeroplane.

  He looked different now. The first time I had seen him he had been just another passenger, an unidentifiable face among twenty-five others. Later, when he had pulled a gun and assumed an individual identity, I had been far too concerned with what was going on to really look at him in any detail. He was of medium height and build, about thirty-five years old. He sported a crew cut and beneath it his face was lean and hard, his eyes cold and blue. He looked like a high-powered executive in a large efficient organisation. Considering the manner in which the VC10 had been handled, his organisation was certainly efficient, but who they were or what they did, when they weren’t kidnapping scientists, I had no idea.

  He wasn’t carrying a gun, probably considering that with just little old me to look after he didn’t need to. Here I showed him how wrong he could be. I stepped out of the taxi when he told me to and kicked him very hard where it would do the most good. Bessie, my old WRAC instructor, would have been proud of me. He doubled over and collapsed to the ground while I started to run. The taxi driver, who was half out of the taxi, started after me, but he needn’t have bothered. Out of all the directions I could have taken, I chose the wrong one. I was ten feet away from the trees that surrounded the clearing when the other American materialised in front of me. Unlike his companion, or probably because of him, he was taking no chances. He held a gun pointing at me and it stopped me dead in my tracks.

  ‘Naughty girl,’ he said. ‘Jack isn’t going to like what you just did to him one little bit.’ He spoke with the accent of the New York waterfront, and while Jack looked like a hardcase business man, this one looked exactly what he was, a hood, pure and simple.

  We went back to pick up Jack, who had staggered to his feet and was behind the taxi being sick. He emerged looking like the wrath of God. To show how much he appreciated what I had done to him, he hauled back and slapped my face with his open hand, so hard that I would have been knocked fifteen feet if his colleague hadn’t been standing behind to catch me. He was about to follow up with a second blow when Hank, which I learned later was his name, called a temporary halt.

  ‘Not out here, Jack. Wait till we get her home.’

  I thought for a moment that he hadn’t got through to Jack, but then the fire went out of his eyes, and he pulled himself together. He even managed a smile, which carried about as much humour in it as a starving leper.

  ‘Didn’t mean to lose my temper, darling,’ he said. ‘Shall we go?’

  The taxi driver had already returned to his vehicle and, as we moved away from the clearing, he started the engine and turned the cab back towards the main road. I memorised the number in case I was ever in a position to do anything about it, but it was probably false anyway.

  Fifty yards through the trees there was another small road and parked there was a small black saloon. Hank climbed into the driver’s seat and Jack pushed me into the back and got in after me. He shoved me, facedown, on the floor, not being particular where he put his hands. Then he placed both his feet in the small of my back and kept them there. Forewarned is forearmed and, to be sure, he now had a gun in his hand which he held inches away from my face, which was pressed into the dusty carpet.

  After we had been driving for a few minutes, he removed one of his feet from the small of my back and used it to kick back the skirt of my new dress so that it settled round my waist. I waited a tense moment for what was to follow, but all he did was to replace his foot on my back. He was content just to look, it seemed. And if looking at my legs as far up as my waist would keep him from doing anything else, he was welcome. I had once been modest, but that was a long time ago; modesty, like innocence, can only be sustained during one’s tender years. My tender years had ceased abruptly the day I had met Mr. Blaser.

  We drove for twenty-five minutes, and by the time we stoppe
d we could have been anywhere. All I saw, as I was hustled from the car and into a building, was a narrow street lined with houses whose front doors opened directly onto the road. It looked like the street of a small village, but could equally well have been a backstreet in Rome itself. Hank stayed behind the wheel of the car and, as we got out, he drove away. Jack ushered me through the front door into the only ground-floor room the house contained. There were a couple of dirty-looking beds, a table, some straight-backed chairs and very little else. Some stairs led upwards and some more led downwards. Jack pushed me towards the latter. I must have hesitated for he smiled again, the same humourless smile.

  ‘Go on, darling,’ he said. ‘Give me trouble.’

  If trouble was what he wanted, he wasn’t going to get any from me, and I did as he asked and headed down the stairs. He followed me, still holding his gun. The stairs were cut out of stone, chipped and ancient. They curved downwards to a door at the bottom.

  ‘Open it, darling,’ he said.

  I pushed it open and descended two more steps to the floor level. There was sufficient leak light from upstairs for me to look around while Jack lit an oil lamp that was hanging on a nail beside the door. The room was bare except for a large chair against one wall. It was an elegant chair, high backed, and with intricately carved arms and legs. There was a coat of arms embossed into the wood of the back and the whole thing looked completely incongruous in this ramshackle house, as though it had been recently looted from some palazzo.

  ‘Sit down, darling,’ said Jack, who had got the light burning. ‘Make yourself comfortable.’

  I sat, and tried to look as though I wasn’t terrified out of my life, which I was. I was so bloody alone; Bertelli had seen me off in what appeared to be a normal taxi and, until I didn’t get off the aeroplane in London, not a soul would know I was even missing. Jack sat on the bottom stair, nursing the gun on his knees, and waiting for the fun to start. Five minutes later there was a noise upstairs and Hank appeared.