Crimson Jade

by George B Mair

  ‘I didn’t know, honey,’ said Grant. ‘But I’d like to know what happened to make him crack. Chances are he goes through life wearing a mask and is normally sane enough to know how to hide the fact that he’s really a screw-ball.’

  Krystelle wrinkled her nostrils. ‘He made me feel sick. That smile! And that laugh! Chesus, David, he’s a creep.’

  Grant handed her a gun. ‘Well, creep or not, he sent the boy for reinforcements, so let’s get organised.’

  ‘You are organised,’ said a familiar voice. ‘Don’t move, and drop the guns immediate.’

  Krystelle was facing the windows, but saw through the corner of her eye a door fitted flush with the wall thrown open and Sureen silhouetted against light from the bathroom behind. ‘If you’ve killed Mikel,’ she said softly, ‘I swear by almighty God that I’ll have you skinned alive. He’s mine!’

  Everything happened very quickly. Grant had time only to register that Sureen was unarmed when she was felled by a blow from behind. He saw only a hand holding a policeman’s baton drop like an axe and in almost the same second three gunmen rushed through the bedroom door into the salon. Krystelle had reacted to the unknown voice and her Biretta was on the floor, but Grant had taken a chance and dropped the nearest with a slug through the chest before a black blur crashed into his skull. He saw a flash of crimson light and felt the sleek softness of Krystelle’s tights as he slithered against her and slumped into darkness.

  8

  ‘Don’t say things like that, David.

  They upset me’

  When Grant recovered consciousness the room was brightly lit but macabre as a medieval torture chamber.

  Krystelle had been stripped and was now stretched like a St. Andrew’s cross against an oblong plank of wood, her wrists and ankles roped to heavy metal rings. His own joints were aching and it took him longer to realise that he also was anchored to a square of wood which rested at an angle against one wall.

  Sureen too had been stripped and tied in a position which must have been agony. Hooks and rings had been driven into the wooden planks in much the same places, but Sureen was smaller than Krystelle, and was being stretched more viciously. Sweat was already breaking on her forehead and she looked semi-conscious.

  He forced himself to try to understand what had happened and then saw that both Petra and Cyp had been strung up like the others but placed on the far right-hand side of the room. The five boards leaning against two different walls reminded him of sideshows in a fair. Or of Cyp’s earlier days with the Indians in backwoods Amazonia!

  Three pale-faced men wearing the impersonal neutrality of professional killers were lounging on divans and Mikel toying with a drink on his favourite chair. He smiled when Grant met his eyes. ‘Odd thing coincidence, David! That stupid woman Sureen arrived from the bedroom at almost the same time as my own brigade entered by another door. Very funny really! But I still don’t know what brought her down.’

  ‘Then why don’t you ask?’ Grant forced himself to speak in an off-hand drawl which might conceal his fury.

  ‘Because she’s concussed. Which reminds me.’ Brandt lifted his gun and almost casually shot one of the three men straight through the chest. ‘Lanza had orders not to hurt anyone,’ he explained. ‘Yet he nearly beat Sureen’s brains out.’ He spoke in Spanish to the other two whose faces had suddenly frozen into pale masks crowned by sleek, skull-tight black hair. Both Grant and Krystelle could follow the swiftly rippling torrent of Spanish and began to reappraise Brandt when they saw that the two men could appreciate his point of view. They had been reminded of orders which were standard for all operations. And of these the most important had been that where possible no one was ever to be put into a condition which would make it impossible for Mikel Brandt to question them. It was vital to know why Sureen Socosani had decided to visit the Magnolia Suite. Indeed, Brandt argued, the safety of all might depend on knowing what had brought her down. Obviously such a small woman could have been captured and silenced by a hand over her mouth and another round her body. Yet Lanza had rushed in with a truncheon and knocked her stupid. They all knew that orders were made to be kept and that death was the penalty for failing to be careful. After all, said Brandt impatiently, they were paid a lot of money and taught to be efficient. Even teaching cost money! And where else could they earn so many pesos per month as they had all been pulling in for several years? What future would they have if anything happened to their employer?

  Brandt became very eloquent at that stage. Life with him meant complete security: provided, of course, that people did as they were told. If they were left alone, since they couldn’t write or read much, they would probably try a stick-up job and land in prison for twenty years. They couldn’t even qualify for a position as guard to a political, because that sort of job was fixed by the Casa Rosada. Men like them needed to be organised and they knew as well as everyone else in the house that the organisation protecting them was perfect. Surely a leader who did all that was entitled to expect that his orders would be carried out!

  The younger of the two men risked a question, but Grant had difficulty in translating since his voice was high-pitched and the accent unfamiliar. ‘We understand, señor, but Lanza was a good man and he made only one small mistake. It is hard to pay with one’s life for just one small mistake.’

  ‘But you made none?’ said Brandt easily, his eyes sparking with mischief while he polished the wood of his magnum.

  The man waved his hands expressively. ‘No, señor. I am not like Lanza. Nat is careful.’

  Brandt’s cheeks crinkled into a broad smile. ‘But not careful enough, Nat,’ he said, and shot him through the neck. ‘Though soon you will really be like Lanza and then you can tell him that you died because your employer doesn’t like men who criticise or argue any more than he does people who disobey orders.’ He glanced towards the remaining man whose face was now fixed as though cast in pale alabaster. ‘Finish him off, Juan. A knife, I think. I’m using the gun too much and I hate noise, even just a little noise.’

  Juan nodded and slowly withdrew a long thin blade from a sheath at his belt. He rose slightly on his toes, balancing for a hair-line of time, and Grant saw only a ripple in the air as the steel streaked into Nat’s chest.

  ‘Very good,’ said Mikel. ‘Just above the heart where the large veins rip easily and death comes quickly. Congratulations.’ He turned towards Grant. ‘As the only real professional here, you probably wonder what all that was about. Or did you understand?’

  Grant tried to speak naturally. ‘Of course. And everyone would agree your point of view. But may I ask a small question?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Brandt. ‘If it is relevant.’

  ‘I’ve just noticed Cyp and your wife and wondered how you managed to get them down.’

  The man laughed aloud and began to wipe his cheeks. ‘It was very funny. Sureen knows this suite quite well and used the wall door. Why I don’t really know, but we may find out when she recovers.’ He suddenly stopped laughing and his eyes were very cold. ‘I wasn’t feeling myself because your woman had tricked me with her cigarette and you had almost knocked me out, but I did hear a voice speaking and recognised Cyp. Apparently my wife and he had decided to take us by surprise. I’m told that Cyp was holding a gun and that my own men arrived just in time to stop him using it. In fact,’ he said slowly, ‘I’ve an idea that they had sent Sureen on ahead to distract my attention and hoped to take us off guard, because, as you know, my wife and she are old friends. Rumour has it that they’ve no secrets either. But until Sureen gets her wits back I’ve no way of finding out for sure, since my wife was born lying.’

  Grant’s wrists were taking all of his weight and beginning to ache, but he guessed that Krystelle would have turned to an old mystery which, to him, still defied explanation. He had seen her use it once and it almost frightened him. She had explained that it was ‘white magic’, and that it would ‘work’ only if she used her power to help others. But it e
nabled her to project herself into a state of suspended animation, and already he could see that she was hanging, completely relaxed from the loops which anchored her to the four iron rings. Her face looked sickly pale and even her normal cinnamon pigmentation had the waxy patina of early death. A tiny quiver occasionally rippled the fold of one elbow and Grant calculated that her pulse had dropped to something around fifteen per minute, which was hardly enough to keep life in her body. Yet he also knew that she had done this only to conserve energy and that he could recall her at any moment. She then needed a few minutes to recover and it would be up to him to estimate when it would be wise to waken her. Meanwhile he also knew that her condition would infuriate Mikel Brandt, and that she was buying time.

  Not even the department’s most pessimistic assessors had rated his mission as having any significant danger potential, and even Admiral Cooper and Miss Sidders had teased him for insisting that he wanted a second string to his bow. They had finally agreed to Krystelle joining him only because both the Admiral and his deeply experienced secretary had come to respect his intuition. But even then minimal equipment had been organised. The invaluable shoes with pivoting heels loaded with nerve gas to which he had so painfully built up an immunity had been left at home. Indeed, a department regulation now forbade their use except under very special anticipated emergencies. Nerve gas was also a new departmental dirty word and the ultimate top brass had clamped down on the Admiral … which proved how sensitive the whole subject had become.

  He had also been forbidden his signet ring with built-in needle and chemicals on the ground that the very possession of such a weapon could be justified only where a mission carried significant risk element. And no one would accept that a casual probing of the Moreiro background was likely to involve anyone in real trouble. The department had been under critical inspection ever since moving from Paris to Belgium and the Admiral, like most of his staff, had been heard to long for the good old days.

  Customs regulations in Argentina were usually complicated and not even bribery could always explain away a gun, although this time he had taken a chance and carried one. Grant never travelled on a diplomatic passport, since diplomatically he didn’t exist, and so for the first time in his life he had only one weapon. Compromise had been reached only where bugging devices and tapes were concerned, and here they had given him the finest apparatus which ingenuity could put together.

  But Grant had now been stripped naked and his only equipment was bluff. That and the girl hanging so limply beside him. Krystelle never moved without protecting not only her rear, but every flank, and the most far-fetched theoretical element of surprise she could think up. It was tantalising that she refused to confide even in those who were working with her, but her argument was faultless. Truth drugs could get facts out of the most resistant subjects and the less people knew about everything the better.

  ‘These were long thoughts, David.’ Brandt was eyeing him with dispassionate curiosity. ‘Why does the arrival of my wife and her father interest you so much?’

  Grant eased himself against the ropes which were cutting into his skin and wondered how it felt to be crucified. Yet one part of him knew that his only hope of survival lay in stalling and playing everything by ear. ‘Father?’ he said slowly, trying to estimate if anyone would have monitored that part of his conversation. It was for sure that much had been taped but not even Brandt had claimed to have it all down. ‘I thought she was his sister.’

  Brandt laid down his gun, poured a straight bitter lemon from the fridge and then raised his glass. ‘To the happiest family in B.A.! But, David, you surprise me. Didn’t you know? Didn’t she explain? I know she hinted at giving you a job and said something about a million. But didn’t she tell you the story of her life?’

  Grant forced himself to smile. ‘Very little. About meeting you in Switzerland and how you were so good at the jumps. A little bit about the Matterhorn. Oh yes! And your boy-friends.’

  Brandt had drunk a good deal, even by Argentine standards, but his hands were rock steady and he appeared to be stone-cold sober. ‘By the way,’ he said abruptly, as though some telepathic message had passed between them, ‘I’ve only been drinking water with pink. I never touch gin, but always keep a gin bottle filled with water around in case visitors feel I’m not sociable. So I won’t be drunk or talking nonsense. Just the truth. Now where shall we begin?’

  ‘Why not at the beginning?’ said Grant.

  ‘Well, it was like this,’ said Mikel, and it occurred to Grant that neither Cyp nor Petra had spoken one word. ‘I was born in ’29 at Belem on the mouth of the Amazon and could claim Brazilian nationality, though, having said that, the rest is complicated.

  ‘But we’ll take this slowly, because you must understand what my wife did to me. You know,’ he said suddenly, ‘Petra is bad. Really bad. What we Catholics call “fallen”. As you’ll understand in a moment.

  ‘Anyhow, back to the beginning. I don’t remember much of life in Belem, though I lived there until I was rising ten. My mother was a good-looking German called Rosa Brandt, so I can claim a German passport. But your people will probably have told you that my father was English, a remittance second son sent away from trouble at home. And, of course, it’s through him that I get my British passport, while I also inherited quite a bit of English money when his father and brother were killed at Dunkirk in 1940 leaving no one in the line except myself.’

  Brandt suddenly laughed. ‘Life can be very odd. My mother had gone back to Germany, but her brother was a naturalised Argentine and it solved a lot of problems when he said he was willing to look after me. Argentina wasn’t at war with the U.K., which made matters much more simple, so the trustees sent me to my uncle who adopted me and I became a second-generation Argentine[*] using his name.

  ‘But,’ he continued, ‘the trustees didn’t know that my uncle was extremely pro-German or that my mother had sent him a letter containing an important secret. I said she was beautiful. Hell, when she was young she must have been ravishing, but she had also been extremely poor, and when the Englishman met her he didn’t know that she was six weeks pregnant by a Portuguese Brazilian with whom she had been living, but who had thrown her out when he decided to marry someone else. The letter described how desperate she had been and how she made marriage her price for the Englishman. But she also made everything very romantic for him. And the Englishman, who was full of that righteous respectability which makes your people hated all over the world, fell for it. He had found the one thing which he no doubt thought impossible, a virgin aged twenty in Amazonia in 1929. Fantastic, he must have said! So they married within a few weeks and my mother tricked him during the first essential ten days or so by organising one long non-stop orgy of drink and sex until she was sure that he had guessed nothing. In fact it was from her that I learned to drink water and pink instead of gin, because she made him pretty drunk every night and so fuddled that he didn’t know what was happening.

  ‘I was born seven months later and she arranged to have a fall when her first labour pains began, so that was that, and only she knew the name of my real father. But as I told you, after Dunkirk she wrote to my uncle, and David, my dear fellow, this will surprise you, the name was Pedro Bosca. Coincidence! Wasn’t it?’

  Grant almost forgot the pain in his limbs and had even begun to ignore the others in the room while Mikel Brandt trimmed his cigar with the delicacy of a surgeon. Juan, the pale-faced gunman, offered a light and Brandt again relaxed into his chair. ‘I was only twenty-one when my uncle died in 1950. His death left me feeling desperately lonely and I developed a curious need to see some of my own people. But my uncle had been told that mother was killed in the Dresden raids, so I went straight to my real father’s estate in Amazonia, to find, of course, that it had been fused with the Moreiro place Cyp Moreiro was running things and seemed helpful when I told him that Pedro Bosca had been my father and that I was looking for my family. It was impossible, of course, to prove i
dentity and I had an idea that if I tried to claim any part of the Moreiro-Bosca estates Cyp would have chopped me.’

  Grant saw that the man was returning to sanity. He was still dangerous, but he now had control of his temper and probably knew exactly what he was doing. ‘You were probably wise,’ he said.

  Mikel stared at him curiously and his hand moved halfway towards his gun. ‘Don’t say things like that, David. They upset me. I’m always wise. Everything I do is wise.’

  He flushed with irritation, and then, quite unexpectedly, smiled. ‘But there was another reason for not making trouble. Cyp had a sister. And Petra was charming. I fell in love with her even when she was only eight or nine and made excuses to go back to Amazonia as often as possible simply to see her. Of course, girls mature early in that part of the world and she was an attractive woman at thirteen, so we all became friends. Of sorts!

  ‘But Cyp kept Petra out of circulation and men weren’t welcome. Bas was always around and Cyp didn’t encourage me too much either. Even although I was quite wealthy and working to put myself into a position when he simply couldn’t reasonably stop us marrying if the girl was willing.’

  He paused and his eyes became very cunning. ‘She was willing, but before Cyp would agree he sent her to Switzerland to learn a little about the world. It was difficult even there to see her without some sort of chaperone, but in a sort of way this actually appealed to me, because I felt it was traditional and that they must be very conservative, then at long last it was finally decided that we would marry on her twentieth birthday. Which was some months later.

  ‘Now during the season that year she had become interested in Helena Mauriac, which, of course, is a stage name only, and Helena was singing at the Colon when I did a short European trip on business. Petra gave me Helena’s home address and I visited her family who now live in Heidelberg.’