Touchfeather

by Jimmy Sangster

  Beamish left me with the two young men and, while they couldn’t see how someone my size, shape and sex could be any problem at all, they didn’t take their eyes off me for a second. For my part, I was worried stiff. I had made a monumental error of judgment, and I didn’t see how I was going to get out of it. Beamish had probably been through a lot over the past couple of weeks, ever since it had been discovered that there was a security leak, and now he was presented with a stranger who knew more than anyone had a right to. He was obviously burning up the telephone wires to London at this moment. Of course, there was one very simple way I could clear myself. A phone call to Mr. Blaser and I would be on my way, but I’d also be out of work. I was going to have to get out of this one all on my own, and I didn’t have the faintest idea how I was going to go about it.

  Beamish came back in five minutes. He hesitated at the door for a moment, wondering whether it was safe to dismiss his heavies. Then he decided that I would hardly get tough on his home ground and told them to leave us alone. But he also told them to wait outside the door, so he couldn’t have been all that sure of himself. Then he peeled off his duffle coat, hung it behind the door and sat down behind his desk.

  ‘Let’s start at the beginning, Miss Touchfeather. Item one, who are you?’

  ‘Katherine Touchfeather,’ I said, and gave him my address for good measure.

  ‘Item two, what are you?’

  ‘I’m an air hostess.’

  ‘For which airline?’

  ‘Air India.’ If he knew that Air India only employed Indian girls, he didn’t show it.

  ‘Item three, what are you doing in Cumming-on-Hardy?’

  ‘I was in love with Bill Partman. I wanted to see where he worked.’

  His piggy eyes grew as wide as they physically could.

  ‘“Was”, Miss Touchfeather?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ I said.

  ‘You used the past tense referring to your feelings. Do you mean you are no longer in love with him?’

  ‘I was referring to Professor Partman,’ I said.

  ‘In the past tense?’

  ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’

  Now he’d really got me, he thought. ‘How do you know he’s dead?’ he asked, using the question like a club.

  I’ve found on occasions the best way to lie your way out of a situation is to tell the truth, or at least enough of it to provide the other side with something they can check up on. So I told Beamish how, as a hostess for Air India, I had met Bill. I told him about our three days together. I told him about Cairo and what I had seen; and, for good measure, I told him about Rome.

  ‘You mean to sit there and tell me that these men actually tortured you?’ he said. It was no time for modesty. I undid my dress, pulled back my bra and showed him. I think that was what did the trick. The scar was ugly and was going to need a skin graft at some later date. In spite of what I had done to him he started to get all masculine and sympathetic.

  ‘Please excuse me, Miss Touchfeather,’ he said and left the office. He could do any one of half a dozen things now, depending on how suspicious he still was, and how efficiently he ran his organisation. He could phone Air India. He could phone the Taj Hotel in Bombay. He could phone the police in Rome, who would switch him straight through to Bertelli, and not mention it. He could phone Captain Singh, if he could find him. And he could run a quick check on my identity at Somerset House, at the passport office, or with my landlord, bank manager, hall porter and, if he was so inclined, my window cleaner. Anything, just so long as he didn’t call Mr. Blaser. But that wasn’t likely since he probably didn’t know Mr. Blaser existed. Very few people did. Who he eventually did contact I never found out. He returned to the office half an hour later and told me I could go. He walked back to the car with me.

  ‘Tell me one thing, Miss Touchfeather,’ he said before we said goodbye. ‘Where did you learn to throw a man like that?’

  ‘It’s part of the regular training for air hostesses,’ I told him.

  ‘Really!’ he said. ‘I never realised.’

  Back at the pub I packed my bag and made my apologies to the Griersons. Suddenly I didn’t want to stay in Cumming-on-Hardy any longer. The idea had been a bad one to begin with and it had run rapidly downhill. I had a local taxi take me to the nearest main line station. Two hours later I was in London and three hours after that I was on my way to New York.

  NINE

  Like I said, I find New York invigorating. The people I know there are mostly fun people, and normally I manage to swing there harder and more often than I do anywhere else. But while I was glad to be back, I wasn’t in a swinging mood. As soon as I got off the aircraft I took a cab straight to the downtown office of Walter Martin. He is Mr. Blaser’s American opposite number—an ex-CIA man who had come in from the cold when someone had broken both his legs by driving a twenty-hundredweight truck over them, after letting all the air out of the tyres first.

  He is about forty-two years old, but looks like an overgrown college boy. It’s the freckles that do it, that and the fact that he’s so exuberant it’s exhausting. If he could have done, he would have jumped to his feet when I was shown into his office. As it was, he paddled his wheelchair from around behind his desk and drove it straight at me, knocking me off my feet so that I landed in his lap. There he pinned my arms to my sides and kissed me enthusiastically.

  ‘Katy, me darlin’,’ he said, in an atrocious takeoff of an Irish accent. ‘How are you after keeping your beautiful, sexy colleen of a self?’

  I had tried to explain that just because I was called Katy and had once flown Aer Lingus, it didn’t make me Irish. But he wouldn’t have it. He released me suddenly and propelled himself over to his desk again. He picked up a slip of paper and waved it at me. ‘London told me you were coming over. I’ve been holding my breath ever since.’

  ‘That’s because you’re a sex maniac and can’t wait to have your wicked way with me.’ He’d never made so much as half a pass at me during the two years I had known him, and I’m sure that if he had I would have succumbed, wheelchair notwithstanding. He was such a nice man, one couldn’t help wanting to do things for him.

  ‘Ah, Katy, migirl. You’ve brought the sun out in this raddled old metropolis. Come and give us another kiss.’ I gave him another kiss, and then sat down on one of his low office armchairs. ‘I hope you’re not intending to venture forth during the daylight hours in that skirt,’ he said. ‘You’ll be locked up.’

  ‘I wore it especially for you,’ I said. ‘All the best swingers in London are wearing it this length.’

  ‘Ah, London,’ he said. ‘Would that I could gaze on her dreaming spires once more.’

  ‘That’s Oxford,’ I said. ‘You gaze on the Hilton, the Playboy Club and the American Express in London these days.’

  ‘There’s progress for you!’ he said. ‘You’re two days early.’

  ‘You’re complaining?’

  ‘Perish the very idea. No, just curious. And it says here that you are on plain flying duties. That makes me curious, too.’

  ‘There aren’t any snags, are there?’

  ‘No. I’ve fixed it up with United. But tell your uncle Walter what’s really going on.’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said.

  ‘Come on, Katy. Admit it. Old Blaser is onto something he doesn’t want to spread around. What is it?’

  ‘Honestly, Walter, there’s nothing. I’m a little tired and I asked for a normal flying job without the side issues. That’s all there is to it.’

  ’But why us?’ he said. ‘Has England run out of airlines along with everything else?’

  ‘I wanted to come to America,’ I said. ‘It’s as simple as that.’

  ‘You mean you couldn’t go on any longer without seeing me—that’s it, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s it exactly.’

  He looked at me for a moment, his face suddenly serious. ‘You look a little bruised around the edges, Katy. It doesn’t
suit you.’

  ‘It’s not just the edges,’ I said. ‘It goes clear through.’

  ’Affaire d’amour?’ he said, evenly.

  I nodded. ‘That and the fact that Mr. Blaser thinks I made a botch of a job.’

  ‘Did you?’

  I nodded again. ‘I suppose I did in a manner of speaking.’

  ‘Wanna tell me about it?’

  ‘What, the job or the other?’

  ‘Either, or both. I’ve got the broadest, most comfortable crying-on-type shoulders this side of the Atlantic.’

  I settled for telling him about Bill. He knew the basic background from the intelligence reports, but he didn’t know about Bill and me. And that is what I talked about. He was a good listener and he let me talk myself into the ground before he interrupted me, pointing out that it was dark outside and asking how would I like some dinner. Taking into account the five-hour time differential, it was way past midnight by my clock, but I wasn’t tired and I didn’t want to spend my first few hours in New York on my own.

  ‘I haven’t found anywhere to stay yet,’ I said.

  ’Voila!’ he said, pressing the buzzer on his desk. A moment later the door opened and Robbie Brightwell came in. She’s Walter’s secretary, a startlingly beautiful girl of twenty-seven extremely kind years.

  ’Who’s using the apartment?’ he asked.

  ‘Nobody,’ said Robbie.

  ‘Wrong,’ he said. ‘Irish is using it.’

  She smiled at me. ‘I’ll let you have the keys on the way out, Katy,’ she said, and left the office.

  ‘Why don’t you marry her?’ I said as she closed the door behind her.

  ‘She hasn’t asked me yet.’

  ‘She’s besotted with you—and you know it.’ He looked sad suddenly, glancing down at his legs. Then, in case I’d noticed it, he smiled at me broadly.

  ‘Where shall we eat?’ he asked.

  ‘You choose,’ I said. ‘I’m off to make myself beautiful. Pick me up in an hour and a half.’

  ‘Wear that skirt,’ he shouted after me as I left the office. Robbie handed me the keys of the apartment and on impulse I asked her what she was doing for dinner.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said.

  ‘Then join Walter and me.’ Before she could think of an excuse, I told her to be at the apartment in an hour and walked out. Going down in the elevator, I felt like a meddling busybody, but although I always seem to fall on my backside in the hearts and flowers department, I’m still an incorrigible matchmaker when I like people as much as I do Walter and Robbie.

  Walter had laid on the full important-client service. There was a uniformed chauffeur to meet me in the main lobby and he escorted me to the company car, parked just outside the main entrance. Walter, like Bertelli in Rome, used a cover. Mr. Blaser is the only one who doesn’t hide behind some other occupation. I’d like to believe it’s because he’s incapable of doing anything other than what he does and that, if he had a cover, he’d make such a botch of it he’d be spotted a mile away. But the actual reason is because, as the operational head of the organisation, he’s far too busy to be bothered with even the smallest outside encumbrance.

  The area controllers, however, aren’t so busy, and just as Bertelli’s Ariadne Export and Import Company do in fact export and import things, Walter’s public-relations outfit really do public relate. And I believe he’s very good at it. Like all successful public-relations outfits he keeps a company car and a town apartment for the use of visiting firemen or, in my case, firewomen. It’s a comfortable apartment in the upper Seventies, and I like using it. The chauffeur dropped my bag in for me and, after I’d wandered round and turned down all the central heating, I poured myself a drink and took it to my bath.

  It would have been nice to say that the evening was an unqualified success, but it wasn’t. Once Walter had got over the initial surprise at finding Robbie was to dine with us, he behaved like the perfect host.

  ‘The two best looking girls in New York, and I’ve got them both,’ he said. But his heart wasn’t really in it. Or rather it was too far in it for him to be his normal exuberant self. It was painfully clear, and had been for a long time, that he adored Robbie Brightwell, who was one of those rare creatures who managed to combine the glacial beauty of a Vogue model with a homemaking heart as big as a house. It was a crying shame. They couldn’t have been more right for each other. But because of his legs he wasn’t going to make the first move—and she was too unsure of his reactions to make it herself. I did the best I could, glad to have someone else to worry about apart from myself. But the evening finally ground to a halt shortly after a man whom Robbie knew vaguely came over to the table and asked her to dance. She was all set to refuse when Walter opened his big mouth and practically forced her onto the floor.

  ‘You’re a stupid bastard,’ I said.

  ‘I know it, Katy,’ he said. ‘And I’ll thank you to mind your own bloody business.’

  And that was that. The party broke up ten minutes after Robbie returned to the table. Walter dropped Robbie off first, and then me. I asked him in for a drink, but he declined.

  ‘See you tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Come round for some lunch.’

  It was late, but I still wasn’t tired. You can’t walk the New York streets alone at night and for a moment I debated whether to call my American Flight Captain. But I decided against it. What he would want I didn’t feel in the mood for. So I settled for The Late Late Show and fell asleep in front of the television half an hour after it started. I woke up two hours later, staggered to bed, where I slept until eleven a.m., which was when Robbie Brightwell phoned me.

  ‘A photograph has come through on the wire. You’re to come down to the office and look at it.’

  ‘Who says?’

  ‘Your Mr. Blaser,’ said Robbie.

  ‘I’ll be there in an hour,’ I said. I made some coffee while I was getting up. The fridge was stocked with everything, but I’m a no-breakfast girl, so I didn’t bother with anything else. One thing I found encouraging, Mr. Blaser still acknowledged my existence.

  Robbie made no reference to the previous evening as she showed me into Walter’s office.

  ‘Top of the mornin’, Irish!’ said Walter. ‘Come and look at this.’

  The ‘this’ he referred to was a wire photograph, not a very good one originally, and the transmission hadn’t been up to much either, but clearly recognisable nevertheless. It was of Hank, Hank of the dirty hands and the foul mouth and the Roman cellar. Just looking at the photograph made my breast start to smart again.

  ‘Do you know him?’ asked Walter.

  ‘I know him,’ I said.

  ‘Rotten company you keep,’ he said, putting the photograph away.

  ’Why? Do you know him?’ I asked.

  ‘Hank Almedo, long time bad guy, not big, but bad just the same. Sells his muscle to the highest bidder and doesn’t care how he’s asked to use it.’

  ‘I know it,’ I said. ‘I’ve scars to prove it.’

  ‘He usually travels around with another hood, name of Jack Kelly,’ said Walter.

  ‘I know him too.’

  ‘You’ve been getting around.’

  ‘I always got around,’ I said. ‘But these men sound like home-ground operators.’

  ‘They are. Alcatraz Island is about the furthest they’ve been from the States.’

  ‘They’re broadening their horizons,’ I said. ‘I met them in Khartoum, Cairo and Rome.’

  ‘What the hell were they doing there?’

  ‘One of them was dying,’ I said.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Jack Kelly.’

  ‘It couldn’t have occurred to a better person. What happened to him?’

  ‘I did,’ I said modestly.

  ‘What did you do? No, don’t tell me; it may spoil some of the illusions I have of you.’ Then, when I said nothing, he asked again impatiently, ‘Well? What did you do?’

  ‘I shot him,’ I said.r />
  ‘Me darlin’ Katy. No wonder Ireland is such a marvellous country, with the likes of you populating her shores. Why didn’t you shoot Hank too?’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘No could do. But I did hit him ever so hard with a piece of four-by-two.’

  ‘Not hard enough, it seems.’ He pressed the buzzer on his desk and Robbie came in. ‘Message to Mr. Blaser. Miss T. identifies Hank Almedo. Record following. Get onto the FBI and ask them to courier all they have on Almedo to London.’

  ‘May I add a PS?’ I asked.

  ‘If you make it short. Cables cost money.’

  ‘Tell him I’ve also identified the one I...the one who stayed in Rome.’ I didn’t know how sanguine Robbie was; perhaps she wouldn’t want me as a friend if she knew I went around shooting people.

  ‘Rephrase that, Robbie,’ said Walter. ‘Miss T. identifies Hank Almedo and the late Jack Kelly. Records on both following.’ Robbie nodded and went out.

  ‘I suppose this means you won’t be staying with us,’ said Walter.

  ‘Nothing’s changed,’ I said. ‘Mr. Blaser is just tying up his loose ends.’

  He took the photograph of Hank from his drawer and looked at it again. ‘Funny,’ he said. ‘Hank’s a muscle man. He’s got about as much intelligence as a four-year-old village idiot. What the hell were he and Jack doing on the wide screen? They’re strictly nickelodeon boys.’

  ‘They were doing what they were told.’

  ‘I know that. But by whom?’

  ‘The Eunuch?’ I ventured.