by Philip Wylie
A few such books, like those of the late Ian Fleming, were based on actual experience in their field. This was also true in the case of The Cadmium Caper and previous tales—by a spinster author. What her real name might be was probably known only to her lawyer, her agent, and perhaps her publisher. Her pen name, Ellen Long, had become a household word.
Her narratives of espionage had a special style and also a central character who was female—a different damsel in each volume. But the faithful fans of Ellen Long were never put off by the change and, indeed, male readers probably preferred meeting the new beauty who appeared in every new book. Each one was gorgeous, clever, amorous, amoral and pitted against awesome forces. Each heroine became mistress of a new hero and, in addition, had several more erotic experiences owing to her profession. Her lover always understood them; he was on her side and under cover, too.
In the end, Ellen Long’s lasses managed two feats: escape; and the downfall of some nefarious group. Her lover would also survive and, presumably, the pair would wed.
To have revived any heroine or hero lover for a similar set of events in a next book would not have been sensible for Miss Long; no one woman could be repeatedly and so violently in love with such an endless series of males. Miss Long thereby sacrificed the continuity that Arthur Conan Doyle achieved with one Sherlock Holmes. But her books had continuity of another sort. Each introduced a lady with a new name, who might be brunette, blonde, a redhead or anything between; but every one not only met and fell in love with a redoubtable male but also had harrowing experiences with sadists. And every one would encounter other men, whose expertise would rouse in her a skill and vehemence Miss Long described with blueprint exactness. To be sure, as Miss Long made evident, female spies are expected to use sexual attraction (with the expertise thus connoted) as part of the job.
Eaper, Grove reflected, had dozens of such agents as his recorded dictation made clear. He had inherited some of them from Canfield Ball, an admiral, nicknamed, of course, “Cannonball,” and Eaper’s predecessor. Axe mistrusted those left-over subordinates, whom he called “Ball’s bints.” The admiral’s “bints,” however, were the first source of the rumors about Project Neptune.
The book in his hands, My Body Keeps You Free, concerned a titian-haired number with a fully developed figure and the face of a girl of fifteen, among other intoxicants. Her name was Dorice Sleeper and she was in bed though awake, at page four, with a suspected enemy agent—in Milan, Italy. Thinking of “bints” was no great associative feat, it was a British word for doxy, and Grove went on to guess that Eaper mistrusted the female agents left to him when Cannonball retired, simply because Eaper had not, himself, supervised their training—an idea Grove refused to carry any further.
Returning to the book, he read on, casually, for a while. But his concentration increased when he reached a point at which Dorice Sleeper, presumed a West German defector, had carried out a fairly hazardous mission in Warsaw, Poland—and that fact was learned by the Soviet network in Poland. Miss Sleeper had then managed to hide in an old, disused bakery. The pursuit was closing in when her real lover—(not the “mighty Pole” or yet the “arrogant Cossack” of earlier chapters)—crashed into the ghostly, spider-webbed edifice with a stolen truck to attempt the lady’s rescue.
As the truck burst in the heavy-studded, plank portals, Grove had a sensation of déjà vu, that is, of experiencing in the present something apparently from the past, but something impossible to recall save as a feeling. Grove then remembered having the same sense while reading other books by Ellen Long. It had been one element among several that had made him sure Miss Ellen Long—whoever she really was—had been in intelligence herself. Some of the classic techniques that appeared in her works were too correct to be invented: means of communication were among them, and ways of identifying other agents, along with places, often far from any tourist routes but described with an accuracy possible only for one who had been in them—and described with the exactness of a trained intelligence agent. These passages related to such matters as concealed alleys, connecting cellars, special exits from restaurants Grove had known, and truthful details of local police procedure.
Now, however, that sense of déjà vu was shifting. Elements of the new story grew less mystifying and, soon, quite obvious. The tatty, abandoned “bakery” where the heroine hid was like a certain unused brewery he’d known: the same bricked-up windows and similar “mixing vats” in the place where he’d seen a different sort. (The authoress hadn’t researched early nineteenth-century breadmaking apparently.) Next, the building “across the street” was a pawnshop, disguised as a secondhand store, also a fact.
Grove read on, with absolute attention, which was unfortunate: it shut down his distant early warning system. He failed to notice that the sounds of the sea breaking regularly outdoors grew slightly louder: he read too fervently.
The door-crashing truck was Polish, driven by the damsel’s lover, Malcom Burns, who resembled a TV star. The real-life actor named here was not known to Grove. The equally handsome spy rammed in, however, and told the endangered (but calm) Dorice what to do. On his truck was an iron lung, stolen (she was never to be told how) from the Warsaw Peoples Lenin Hospital. It was supposedly being sent, he informed her, to Monaco, for exhibition at the Monaco World’s Fair of Surgical Progress, as a token of Soviet achievement in the field.
She got into the massive steel cylinder and Burns closed its neck opening. They took off, Dorice inside but able to breathe through a length of hose her lover had provided. Grove, by then, had envisaged the stratagem that would be used to cross the frontier and he was right, almost to the last detail.
Malcom Burns stopped the truck, after turning into a forest road, when they reached the border. Miss Sleeper was then obliged to conceal herself under the padded lining of the iron lung. Its proper closure was made and its plump activated. After that, no air entered and none escaped. The apparent emptiness of the interior could be observed by anyone who looked through glass panels, inset for that purpose. When they were halted by border guards, Burns explained, in Russian-accented Polish, what he was transporting and where it was bound. He also explained why the apparatus was working. The Polish soldiers and their Soviet superior could well believe that explanation—an embarrassed admission of a truck driver who was supposed to run the lung, from time to time, but who had dutifully got it going and now couldn’t stop it.
The guards peered into the lining—amused greatly, but unsurprised by the Russian’s dilemma, his lack of know-how. They found and liberated a case of vodka in the truck cabin and opened a bottle forthwith. The Russian in command looked over the iron lung a second time and showed Burns how to halt the machinery. The guards then demanded that Burns share several rounds of vodka before departure. Since he could not well refuse, Miss Sleeper lay in the steel tank without fresh air, for a considerable time. When the truck finally departed and was cleared by friendly people at the other border, but in full view of the Poles, Bums raced away till out of view—and range. He had only then been able to open the lung and found the lady unconscious; almost dead by asphyxiation, and battered by the pump action, as well.
Grove went that far—and knew who “Ellen Long” was: Arthur Xavier Eaper.
He knew for many reasons, all of which could be summed up in one: only he and Art had shared the real version of this parodied “escape.” Grove had skipped its humiliating details in his official reports and Art Eaper, whose face was saved, would be the last man on earth to mention his part in the affair. He reflected that, since the return from Ellen Long’s books, with the sums for movies made from them, the translations and so on, had been reckoned by “her” publisher at more than four millions, Eaper had a nice thing going.
What he missed during those musings was a faint movement of air in a room where air conditioning caused no such draft.
He kept wondering why Eaper had chosen to do this stuff as a female writer, wondering if, perhaps, Eaper had
furnished the material and some lady ghost the prose. Then he realized something else as he contemplated this absurd discovery.
There was a person in the room, a man.
That finding was easy, if belated.
Grove gave no outward evidence of awareness. His head, bent over the book, remained at that angle, though his eyes switched to a sugared and partly sucked lime on the table beside the humidor. He went back to reading and reached blindly for the lime. It was a lime, which he had been sucking, after sugaring the opened end. Feet approached on the rug, soundlessly, and Grove saw shoes that were badly made and of large size; the trouser cut was poor. That would mean a third major discovery of the evening, if it indicated what he both hoped and, perhaps, equally dreaded.
He went on, not reading but seeming to. A chair halfway across the room was lifted by one hand, judging from its angle, and carried forward. The chair was set down facing Grove, who, absently, sucked the lime again and put it back, absently.
The intruder sat; and sat still. A long time went by while nothing else happened. Grove wondered why, and decided the other expected him to look up, eventually, or catch sight of the visitor in an eye corner and then look up and be appalled. Grove decided to play mouse to the other’s cat. He turned a page, eventually, seemed to be caught by something else, looked up abruptly and reacted by gasping, half-rising and slumping down, the best he could do as turning pale on self-command wasn’t within his capability.
He sat back slowly then, and stared.
The other man enjoyed the performance and when it was concluded—Grove drew deep breaths at the finale of his act—the man spoke.
“Good evening, Shrub. Tree. Maple. Bush. And so on. I’m disappointed.”
His gun was steady: a Manasco-Windscale .404, the new Klokvik model they were making in the trans-Ural plant, heavy, but with an advantage. The silencer was not attached to it but included in it. Camouflaged, too, Grove noted-decent thought, to paint random patterns on a gun so it would not stand out in a wide variety of places, such as bushes or crowds. Neat, he felt.
Elbow on chair arm, and in no hurry; but he was changed, Grove saw. He smiled almost amiably now, and scrutinized the intruder: bullneck that became a dough head, the flat face of Siberia, pale irises and black-red beard, hands like mud pies made of mashed potato, fat-looking belly and huge feet. Feet that lacked the first joints of all ten toes, Grove remembered. This stewed-looking three hundred pounds of ugliness was Borotky Solentor and his favorite occupation was information-gathering with personnel removal, his score, unknown, but the known number sickening; and his methods, though numerous, were beastly and protracted, if possible.
“You’ve aged but you still look the same,” Grove said without particular emphasis. “Like an albino toad, Borrie.”
When he reached “toad,” he risked death, but he added, “In spite of some excellent plastic surgery.” And then, “Why are you disappointed?” The forefinger relaxed on the trigger, with that.
“Don’t pretend you knew when I entered. You did not.”
“Never said I did. So?” Grove’s only sign of stress was the tapping of a foot.
“You were once a little less obtuse.”
“Who sent you? That loveable mother of yours?”
Again, the putty monster almost fired. Again the reference was too unexpected and too knowledgeable to permit the intended flash that would disintegrate Grove’s skull and decorate his wall with an instant Jackson Pollock.
“My mother sends worst wishes.”
The man’s tongue wet the big lips. Most Genghis Khan types, Grove reflected, have thin mouths. This one, however, had the classic flat face and wide nose but not the mouth or the square body common to people of the Lake Baikal territory; his was the body of a decadent Buddha.
“Anything on the stove but murder?” Grove asked, not cheerfully, but near it.
“It depends. Justice—finally; at once, if need be. If not, you have a long night ahead, you cursed imperialist ghoul!”
“Naughty, naughty!” Grove shook his head. “Ghoul! Indeed! From you?”
The man actually snarled, to Grove’s slight amazement: bad show, in the Ellen Long idiom.
“I am going to produce a small whistle and blow it, in time,” the suet blob said. “It is not an audible whistle. Outside, a dog will hear and his hackles will rise. My assistants will enter. The soiree will begin—or, if you prefer, soiree and its morning continuation.”
Grove responded in a calm, near-jovial voice. “You can shoot me, yes. But to do so might be foolish.”
Silence. Solentor sat still and Grove tapped a foot monotonously.
Borotky Solentor had been the “dungeon master” of Beria’s regime. Now, if Eaper’s dictation was reliable, he was director and, by choice, chief torturer-executioner of the PPPG, a new branch of Soviet intelligence not known to exist except by three people in the USA apparatus. He was skilled in so many facets of his profession that Grove, looking at the living being, had difficulty in believing what he had known to be real. They’d last met a quarter of a century ago? About.
Solentor represented the unspeakable, the unthinkable, Torquemadan designs made more horrible by modern science. A Doctor of Medicine, a surgeon, who had never used his arts to heal; a clinical destroyer then, and the man who’d perfected some years back children-kidnaping and closed TV circuit parent-watching as the children began to die. The black genius who had accelerated brain-washing by a prior process of sex-washing: by—it was said—turning virile men into compulsive homosexuals before the next steps of mind revision were undertaken.
The dungeon master had long since earned an explicit trade name. In the Kremlin, in a few other Soviet bureaus, in some of the intelligence centers of other nations, it was known but rarely uttered. Men, the toughest, hated to hear it: The Lever.
To bear what he had been obliged to, Grove had finally found the means. With eyes on the fat frog and seeing through him to the book-lined, picture-hung, conventional living room, and beyond to the sea and the stars, Grove thought of the road to his means. For he had been forced to learn a way to endure mere existence, after his best friend, Rodney “Rumble” Russel, the famous M-ONE-K of Britain, had been caught by Arabs. The slow death of that brilliant and warmhearted man had been revealed to Grove by motion-picture film, mailed from Argentina. Watching that half hour of 8-millimeter film had almost destroyed Grove’s value to his organization, to his nation, to mankind.
On the verge of madness, Grove had received his insight. Men who did these things, he realized, were more than sick and what they did was different from a purely professional effort to gain information.
The film that had all but defeated Grove without actually touching his flesh led him to understand the reason for its terribleness. If a sufficiently frightful series of torments could be inflicted and then made known to the enemy, he would lose heart and feel terror he could not master, become demoralized before he moved into some next action or assignment. Such an effort to frighten was that of frightened people.
Grove had then understood Shrecklichkeit or “frightfulness,” fully. And ever since, he had known it as proof of fear. That led to his new strength. The way one resisted all such threat of terrorism involved moral courage, used against actual cowardice.
A minute passed. Grove asked himself questions while the Russian pondered. How did he get in with no warning? There had been warnings, Grove suddenly knew, noted subconsciously. A few odd sounds and a stronger breeze from the sea side.
Solentor now smiled. His big, steel-filled teeth were bared.
Solentor’s use of those square incisors and heavy bicuspids was legendary. Filed to points and blades. So his smile was a reminder, a weapon.
“You are now, Grove, admirable,” he said.
Grove’s reply was pleasant. “I thought you were disappointed in me.”
“I take part back. I must not pull this trigger? Or reach for my whistle and summon my team? It would be risky
?”
“Correct.”
“Marvelous. You are in a hopeless situation. You know it. Yet you tell me that I am. And so—hospitably! Why? Why so much acting for a bluff? Do you want to die—as you are going to? Have you—‘had it’—at last? Or do you imagine that you may yet somehow gain an advantage? I wonder. I keep motionless to indulge you. Yes. And to ask the underlying thing, the psychology of your apparent—aplomb. It is, still, remarkable.”
“You can talk,” Grove answered, calmly. “I can. But fire? No. Reach to get that silly whistle? No. So the question is simple. Which is worth more to your folks? Me, dead? Or both of us? Am I worth you? After my long years out of the business and in spite of your continued career? That, only that, is the question you must answer.”
For a moment the Siberian was almost worried. Not by the bluffing words, however near to genius their projection and style, but by a small observation. Grove had not moved at all, save to talk, and to—this was the trifle that perturbed—keep tapping his foot, as he’d done from some point since he’d looked up at Death. Why that?
His deduction made him draw a breath and laugh in a way that Grove recalled, a way that had been added to files that perhaps still existed in some warehouse now the property of the CIA:
“The man’s laughing style may assist in his identification as he seems unaware of its uniqueness. It is like the close-heard sound of a defecating cow: the little grunt of opening, the fluttered twitter of slight gaseous escape, the louder vocal grunt, the gush-noise of issue and the heavy plat of ground spatter.”
Grove could guess the author of that footnote in the Solentor OSS record. By now, he surmised, that file must fill several drawers.
“I wonder,” he said when the laugh came to its smacking end, “what the devil brought you here? I don’t mean to my place—but Hawaii? Don’t you trust your own people? Is the mission so important you feel obliged to quit your blood-soaked swivel chair in Moscow—”
