The Ill Wind Contract [Joe Gall 10]

by Philip Atlee

  "What did that cost you?"

  "Oh…" He calculated. "Little over four hundred thousand but worth a million in the States. I got a lot of breaks buying stuff for her in Hong Kong and here in Japan. I plan to sail her home in the spring, when my home leave is due."

  "Why are you working at this two-bit job if you can afford a ship that expensive?"

  The question seemed to embarrass him. "Oh, family always has worked, you know. Insist on it, really."

  "Admirable," I said.

  "Not really an extravagance, either. Already had two offers to buy her, at a whopping profit, when she arrives in a U. S. port."

  "Why not send her down to Java on her sea trials," I suggested. "Can she carry freight?"

  "Sure," said Frank. "All those big junks are work boats. They can call, as the fellow says, wherever cargo offers."

  "Then why not send her down there on this Borobodur restoration project? To Semarang, which is a good commercial harbor north of the temple. I'll bet you could pick up enough loot on coastwise hauling to reduce her cost sharply. Matter of fact, I'll help arrange the contracts."

  Harvard Frank was delighted. "Sounds fabulous! And I could unload her at twice the profit after the cruise to San Francisco. Let me pry into the details of it, eh?"

  I nodded. Frank hoisted himself to his feet, and I got Katja's jacket and asked him to return it to her.

  He refused to accept the jacket. "She's in your territory now, dad." he said. And ambled off in sections, out of the room and down the hall. I heard him jolly-timing the old Japanese at the front door, and the door closed.

  I had finished my beer, brushed my teeth, and was meditating on the assignment, sitting cross-legged, when the old man came padding back to my door. "Another friend come," he said. I was staring at him by the faint illumination of the hanging globe light when Katja Arnkloo swished in, her stiletto-heeled pumps dangling from one hand.

  "I came to apologize," she said, "if you'll let me."

  "No need for it. I thought Frank and I were going to have a private meeting and discuss some business, that's all. You are, and mean to be, a distraction."

  "Why do you call him Frank?" she asked. "That is not his name."

  "I know. But he looks like a Frank to me."

  Puzzled, she walked over to stand before me. From my seated position I had a direct view of her legs, framed below the short skirt. They were well-shaped and muscular, as if she might be able to really romp on them. No garters or garter belt impeded my scrutiny, so I knew she must be wearing parity hose.

  "May I sit down?" she asked. When I nodded, she dropped effortlessly into a sitting position directly in front of me. Crossing her feet into the lotus position easily. The blond hair was upswept still, but Katja Arnkloo was slightly disheveled. A tiny girl with a perfect body and oversized breasts. The aureoles around the nipples were not large, and I wondered if she had gone silicone.

  She was in those fleeting years between youthful flamboyance and such aids. Her sexuality was a flaunted thing, and from the size of the generous mouth I thought she would be generously endowed in her other apertures. She had been used often; it showed in the satin perfection of the fair skin, like an erotic athlete's bloom. There was a smell, too.

  Not an aroma or a fragrance. A frank womanly smell that announces that the wafter has been engaged by many men. in much mutual delight. Most women foolishly try to mask this essential with Arpege or good-tasting douche powders. They shouldn't; it lessens the musk of their attractiveness.

  Sitting before me, waiting, Katja Arnkloo was silent. I looked over her head into the darkened formal garden, and something generated in my head rushed down my spine unbidden.

  I knew about Katja and her sisterhood. I knew that women like her were something you couldn't do with, or without. They were a type charged with sexual electricity. One vagrant glance across a room and you had crotch fever. Fully-clothed, one chance swaying of their skirt could spin you around on a busy street.

  I had collided with three such women in the last few years, and i was determined that Katja would not be the fourth. Any woman can be a bitch-in-heat at the right time of the cycle, but women of this special type were spoilers and flipped reason out the window.

  Baroness Tamvelius, on Tenerife island… Jannina, the tall black Venus who had worked and died for me in Mexico… The aloof Irish beauty in Peru… I didn't want any more of that blowtorch intensity.

  "Perhaps we can start over," said Katja quietly. "If we do that, perhaps you will like me more." Her hands were spread, palms up, between her thighs.

  "Possible," I answered.

  "I did not mean to dispute you or interrupt your business appointment. I did not know that you were his superior."

  "I'm not. We just had some work to do and it needed privacy."

  "I did not know that. I had just met him, and you came like a storm cloud into what I thought was a social occasion. Putting me down."

  I smiled. "Wasn't it a put-down after a put-on?"

  Katja shrugged and I was again conscious of her full breasts.

  "What difference? The cri-cri people, they use both."

  "I'm not much on the cri-cri people." I said.

  The shapely little girl nodded. "I know. I think you are a man who has landed at too many strange airports, late at night, with nobody to meet him."

  My smile slipped. That comment was very near to the story of my life. Slow rain was grieving into the garden.

  "May I make love to you?" she asked.

  It was the best offer I had had in some time. But even my enemies have never ranked me as a sybarite. I didn't answer, and she took my silence to mean consent. Broke her pose and began to work me over.

  Trailing fingers, wide mouth inciting, tongue darting… all the erogenous centers…

  And I sat in my Buddha isolation and got progressively less interested. My entire attention was fixed on some simple Zen rules, removing me from that place, and the muscles in my shoulders and belly never quivered.

  Katja was not used to defeat; she had not earned her honest and exciting smell in the Little Leagues. She withdrew, frowning and shaking the destroyed blond hive of her hair, and I watched her settle back into the sitting position.

  "I'm sorry," she said, flushed and trying to fix her hair. "I shouldn't have come here, but I thought I might find a man behind those stormy eyes…"

  She began to weep and completed her ruin. Her legs were akimbo, wrinkling the panty hose, and her mascara was running. One of her false eyelashes had become unmoored, and it gave her a woebegone, cockeyed look.

  "Don't be sorry," I said, and her streaked face lifted.

  "Who do you think you are?" she sobbed. "I only did what many men have taught me to do."

  Rain was still hammering on the roof. Her hair was around her face untidily, and the mascara was trailing black streaks down her face and across the wonderful breasts.

  "That's the whole point, kid," I said gently. "You were trying to do something to me. Which makes you a whore. An exciting one, perhaps, but still a lousy supplicant. A nothing."

  This observation accelerated her grief, and the breasts shook.

  "To make this game work, the man must pursue. You'd better understand that."

  She raised her tear-streaked face. "That makes me just your bitch-dog, doesn't it?"

  "Could be. Or could be just the natural order. But if the velvet-headed serpent is going to glide tonight, I'll tell him where to go."

  Katja sat up straight, staring at me defiantly. Leaning out of my Buddha position, I ripped the filmy blouse off and tore the panty hose garment loose. The latter movement took three jerks, and moved her around considerably. She was in her natural position, on her back, when I took her first.

  Then I flipped her over expertly, because a lot of those lonely journeys of mine had been to seaport towns.

  ***

  An appreciable time later Katja slipped into my robe and went pattering down the hall in her ba
re feet. I heard her chattering away to the old attendant, in Japanese, and she came back in twirling with ballerina grace and shoving the sleeves of the robe above her elbows. While I watched, lounging on the futon, she poured two thin teacups full of Scotch and delivered mine kneeling. Whispering something in Japanese.

  "Watch your mouth!" I warned her sternly, and tossed off my teacupful. Katja giggled and sipped at hers.

  " 'Stay me with flagons,' " she answered in English, " 'comfort me with apples…' " And, holding her cup steady in both hands, put her head down to touch the tatami mat. I laughed, leaned over, and cupped a firm breast in my right hand. It had a wonderful live weight.

  "If your Shogunate Lordship permits." she whispered, "the! old one is drawing me a bath, which I need sorely."

  "Set the jug here by me," I instructed, "and go soak your sorely."

  She bowed, backing out, and soon I heard her splashing and singing in the big wooden tub. Going to the far wall, I moved back the panel and got another futon, spread it beside my own. Then I had another cup of Heather Dew and hummed an impromptu medley. Things like "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening, When the Frigging Begins, I'll be There," and "I Wish I Was a Ring upon My Lulu's Hand…"

  I was wonderfully relaxed. The little Swedish girl was an erotic marvel, alternately limpet and elusive as quicksilver. The "flagons and apples" quote she had slipped in was from the Song of Solomon, and Katja was entitled to be both sick, and sore, of love.

  Considering the finely grained texture of the un-painted pine ceiling boards, I reflected that she might appeal to me because I had a penchant for ladies near to spoiling. The ravishment of virgins had never interested me; that is a plumbing problem, and no sport. I wanted women when they were at full bloom and not coming on coy and clumsy.

  Or, perhaps, even a trifle overripe, trying to ignore the slide on the down side. That makes them most generous.

  ***

  When Katja came back, toweling vigorously and still damp from her bath, her face was scrubbed clean and she looked about seventeen years old.

  Even with the sleeves rolled up,'my robe engulfed her. After she had dried her honey-colored hair, she deftly made a white turban of the towel, stepped out of the robe, and went sliding under the futon.

  "Good night, Grumpy," she said, peering at me like a mocking dryad.

  I nodded, switched off the globe light, and said "Good night to you, Dopey!"

  She laughed, and soon her breathing had deepened into sleep.

  EIGHT

  I AWAKENED SUDDENLY BUT DID NOT MOVE or open my eyes, because I knew somebody was watching me. It was Katja Arnkloo, the swinging bird from UNESCO's Paris office. Through nearly closed eyelids I could see her hugging her drawn-up knees, smoking a long cigarette in a Tar-Guard holder. The tiny blonde wore nothing, and had already been at her ablutions.

  When she coughed, I growled "Hack, hack! Do you think that niter is going to help you?"

  "Matter of fact, it will," Katja said grandly, flourishing the cigarette and holder. "This device removes virtually all the odious tar."

  "Unhunh…" I shoved up, pushed my unruly hair back, and arose. Popped my spinal vertebrae and cracked my neck on both sides like castanets. Katja 50 was astonished, so I stood her up, made her clasp both hands behind her neck, and popped her vertebrae.

  "That was nice," she said. "More, please."

  I dropped my hands, lifted the girl by her narrow waist, and swung her aloft. Then i dropped her on her butt with a solid thud.

  She curled into a ball and did a neat backflip. Landing on her feet and facing me, with her tongue stuck out, still holding the cigarette holder in her mouth.

  "Put that damned cigarette out," I suggested. "I wish you could see a cancerous lung at autopsy."

  She stubbed out the cigarette and, as I was turning down the hall, asked if I would take her to her hotel. I asked where she was staying. She shouted "Otani," and I told her I would after I had bathed and shaved. That I wouldn't be long and why didn't she order tea and crumpets or something while I was at it? As I turned into the bathroom I heard her talking to the old man attendant and wondered again at the fluency of her Japanese. It was something to check.

  As I shaved my lean visage, with the bloodshot blue eyes staring out of it, I thought grimly that everything that happened to me was something to check. Later, over the little black-lacquered table, sipping at the steaming tea, Katja asked why all my eyebrows were plucked out. I explained, briefly that I had so much scar tissue there, across the brows, that the hairs grew in crookedly and sometimes got infected in the follicle.

  She leaned forward to stare at my corrugated forehead and traced over my scarred brows with a cool forefinger. When we were ready to leave, she was wearing the jacket over the see-through blouse and looked quite decorous. Outside, the morning was sunny and bright, and when she begged for a walk before we cabbed to her hotel, I nodded. We went down the narrow street to a larger one and passed two small moon-faced boys flying kites shaped and painted like carp. The kites rustled as their rice-paper tails whipped back and forth behind them, and Katja clapped her hands in delight.

  So I had to tell her about the Japanese fishing town where the inhabitants used to fly kites that weighed more than a Cadillac. Some of them were fifty feet long, and two hundred men were required to control the lines. She was properly awed by this thought, as I always had been. I would have given anything to see one of those gay monsters in a spanking breeze.

  After we had made a few more blocks, we spotted a cab and were walking toward it when we passed a door ajar, leading into a courtyard. From inside came a lilting sound of laughter and giggling, and we peered around the door to see seven Buddhist nuns skipping rope.

  They were all wearing dark robes, with some kind of cloth stock at the neck, and the usual clogged geta sandals. What made the scene odd was that all the nuns were plump, big-headed, and absolutely bald. Yet they were going at the rope-skipping like a rite of spring, two whirling the long rope, and the others dancing in and out of its range. Lifting their clogged feet high and showing rows of perfect teeth as they surrendered themselves to this small abandon in the sunlit courtyard of the nunnery.

  I laughed out loud, because their joy was infectious. And turned to Katja just in time to get her fashionable pumps thrust into my hands. She ran into the courtyard and with perfect timing ducked under the whirling rope. Her legs came up in perfect rhythm.

  Katja was obviously a trained gymnast. After the first shock of her sudden entry the bald nuns began to titter behind their hands and bow and applaud. Blond hair streaming, Katja jumped rhythmically as the rope whipped around; she motioned it to greater speed. When its passage was almost blurred, she slipped nimbly in and out, motioning for the Buddhist sisters to join her.

  Several of them did, and I never saw a better second-act curtain for a musical in my life. The tiny, fair girl with the streaming hair and her leaping and whirling Asian companions in an impromptu celebration. The other nuns with clean-shaven heads could not stay aloof, and I watched the whole courtyard explode with leaping ladies. The Mother Superior of the order, attracted by their shrieking laughter, came out on a balcony and, shriveled and ancient, peered over her spectacles and smiled.

  Katja whirled out from under the rope and, running backward toward me, bowed and blew kisses at the nuns still skipping. They waved good-bye to her, crying out in Japanese, and I handed the little blonde her shoes. We walked to the corner and got in the cab. She was trying to catch her breath and her hands fumbled. I put the shoes on for her.

  "What fun!" she exclaimed. "I haven't done that since I was a child."

  I nodded and gave the cabdriver the name of her hotel.

  ***

  At ten o'clock that morning I was waiting in the lobby of the Marunouchi Hotel, and when the Pigeon Bus tour of Tokyo began, I was among its members. Listening to the artful, pert spiel of the pretty Japanese girl in the green uniform and cap. At the Palace Hotel an Ame
rican in an expensive sports jacket, a lean man with thinning hair, boarded the bus and claimed the seat beside me. Burt Holroyd, Tokyo station chief for the Agency. He studied his map of attractions intently until the pretty Japanese girl again began deliberately butchering the English language over her microphone.

  "Okay," murmured Holroyd irritably. "You pulled me out of my office. I thought you didn't like working stiffs like me."

  "Not that at all," I answered. "Just that important fellows like you, who stay in one place for years and years, get to be better known than the local bank robbers."

  "Oh, horseshit, Joe!" he snapped. "What do you want?"

  After I had reported on my hectic life since arriving in Japan, in detail, I told him I wanted a dossier on Frank, my briefing officer, and he snorted again. I could see the pale patches on his tanned neck, where he had been machine-gunned while swimming in the Yangtse River after the Japanese had shot his airliner down.

  I told him that I also wanted a full report on Nogi, the black sumo wrestler. His origins, standing, relatives, the whole works. He nodded and went on studying his tourist map. Next, I said, was a dossier in depth on Katja Arnkloo, the UNESCO employee who was supposed to accompany the mission into Java.

  "Okay," Holroyd nodded.

  "Use cables if you have to. This Arnkloo bird comes on wild and might cause trouble after we get there."

  He nodded again.

  I pushed then, because it was my ass that was going on the line in Java. "If Sukarno twitches again, toward Peking, would the agency set up a coup? Or the threat of one, to keep him in line?"

  Holroyd smiled grimly and folded up his map. "You've started gossiping now. Joe. I don't make policy. I just carry it out when I can."

  The sightseeing bus was slowing down for another shrine; he was about to leave. "All right," I said hurriedly. "Has Bung Karno got enough money to mount anything?"