Dragonfire

by Ted Bell

  China’s cheeks suddenly flushed red. “Those are almost exactly the words you said that other night when we met at the Casino in Monte Carlo. Where’s the devil-may-care boy I knew in Cannes a decade ago? You’ve become a bore in your old age. Spare me the agony, please.”

  “Yes, I did say those words or something to that effect. But this time is going to be different. Because tonight you, my dear, are bloody well going to tell me what I want to know.”

  “Oh, really, Alex? You think you can force me? And how, exactly, do you propose to get it out of me? Are you going to bend me over a chair and take me from behind, you big brute? Make me whimper and beg?”

  An open invitation now hung in the air between them. She had told him what she wanted. It was all he needed. He had already decided to take what he wanted, and devil take the hindmost. He took a step toward her, grabbed hold of her arms, and pulled her close, pressing his mouth onto hers, forcing his tongue between her lips. Her breasts were large and warm against his naked chest, and he swept his arms around her, drawing her still closer. He examined the deep dark eyes, the red lips, the gleam of firelight on all that voluminous jet-black hair.

  The last thing he expected was for her to resist. But he was somewhat shocked to suddenly find both of his wrists clamped in the iron grip of her two hands! Puzzled, he stared at her. Had he simply misread her signals? Maybe. But then, with a mischievous smile, she lowered herself down onto her knees. She was on the faux-fur rug before the fire, pulling him down onto the rug with her. Still, she held his wrists tightly captive, not allowing him to come close to her.

  Hawke now felt the heat rising within him, but he got the message. If this game was going to continue, it would be on China’s terms alone.

  He knew that he wanted her, but he also knew that he had to wait for her to give her assent, and a part of him cursed the fact that, even now, in this most intimate of moments, she insisted on playing her bloody games.

  He pulled her toward him, the flickering flames painting the silhouettes on the ceiling. He kissed the pale sheen of moisture on her cheeks. . . .

  When they had finished and were both lying on their stomachs on the rug, smoking cigarettes and staring into the fire, she smiled at him and said: “Well, Alex, my dear man, if that’s your new interrogation technique, I must confess that I like it. A lot. Any more questions for me, sir?”

  Hawke smiled, but had no reply to that one.

  CHAPTER 38

  Sevenoaks Plantation, Virginia

  February 1942

  Tiger Tang sat straight up in bed. He’d heard the unmistakable sound of rubber automobile tires crunching on gravel in the drive below his bedroom windows. Now, blinking his sleep-encrusted eyes, he looked over at the illuminated alarm clock on his bedside table. His brain was still half asleep. What day of the week was this? It wasn’t yet seven o’clock in the morning, for Crissakes! Okay, Sunday morning, that was it. What in hell was Hamish doing, calling his bedroom on a Sunday and at this unholy hour? Had the man lost all of his marbles? Was he entirely off the rails?

  Tiger stared at the squat black Bakelite telephone and dared it to keep ringing, burying his sleepy head beneath his pillows. The lighted button on the phone was blinking BUTLER’S PANTRY. Muffled a scosh, but he could still hear the damn instrument, damn it to hell!

  After an eternity, it stopped ringing.

  Five minutes later, someone, most likely Hamish, was back at it.

  Tiger picked up this time.

  “This had better be good, by God,” Tiger said, not bothering to hide the noxious fumes of his simmering anger.

  Hamish sighed and said, “Frightfully sorry to disturb you, sir. But I thought it only prudent to make you aware that a yellow taxicab is waiting outside under the porte cochere. No one has made any move to exit the vehicle. It’s just sitting out there with the motor running. Perhaps someone gave the driver the wrong address? The windows are all steamed up, and I cannot even tell you how many of them are inside the taxi and just sitting out there, sir. All a bit on the bizarre side, if you ask me, sir.”

  “Oh, Christ,” Tiger said. Incredibly, this was a repeat of what had happened at midnight, just last night!

  Miss Woolworth had shown up at his door sometime in the wee hours last night. He had been in bed, fast asleep, for more than an hour. But Hamish, with his usual fervor, had rung him up to announce her arrival, and he’d hauled himself out of bed and padded down the wide sweeping staircase to pull open the front door to the frigid night air. The evening snowfall had turned to sleet and freezing rain.

  “You look like a drowned rat, my darling,” he had said, eyeing her mop of drenched wet hair and the rain droplets running down from her chin.

  She’d been to a big soiree her parents were hosting down at the Sagamore Hill Golf Club, and apparently, she was well into her cups. She had an open bottle of Dom Pérignon and two crystal champagne coupes. She stood up on her tiptoes and gave him a sloppy wet kiss.

  “Take me to bed, Daddy,” she whispered. “Your baby girl has been a bad girl, but she still needs it bad. And I’m freezing to death out here.”

  And so inside and so to bed.

  And now someone else—God only knew whom—had decided it was a very bright idea to show up at his very private country home at this time of the morning! Bloody well uninvited and bloody well unannounced, waiting outside his front door! With a sigh of deepest regret at not getting a few more hours of much-needed sleep, Tiger rolled out of the cozy, high-thread-count Egyptian sheets and the huge four-poster bed piled high with goose-down pillows, and slipped his feet into the leather slippers waiting by his bedside.

  He tried not to make a sound, lest he wake the sleeping beauty who now so frequently shared his bed, keeping him busy into the wee small hours. There were four large windows in his boudoir overlooking the rolling lawns and gardens in the front of the house and the sweeping drive mounting the hill and opening into the gravel car park and the porte cochere.

  He made his way over to the nearest window and looked down at the car park and the drive. The automobile he’d heard on the gravel was idling under the porte cochere, its rooftop still weighted down by last night’s snow squalls. He squinted at the legend painted on the passenger door at the rear. GEORGETOWN YELLOW TAXI, he saw, was emblazoned in dark green on the cab’s flanks.

  Still, who the hell had come to call at this ungodly hour?

  The rear door swung open, and gazing down, the ambassador saw a tall, well-built fellow who was attired in a tailored Royal Navy officer’s uniform and who now removed his white cap, the one with all the scrambled eggs on the black brim, uncovering a full head of unruly black hair. The still sleepy ambassador had an instant flash of recognition. Hawke! If it wasn’t bloody Lord Hawke knocking on his door! Back from England already? He hadn’t heard a peep out of him since the day he’d left for England, right after asking Tiger, at the Cosmo Club bar, to promise to keep an eye on his fiancée while he was gone because she had a tendency to find trouble wherever she went looking for it. . . .

  And he’d pledged that he would. And then the pretty little troublemaker had wound up spending a whole lot of time in his bed. And his treachery ate away at him. His own. And, hers!

  He stood for a moment at her bedside, looking down at the sleeping Winfield Woolworth, aka little Miss Five ’n’ Dime. He was aware, as usual, of his mixed emotions surrounding his new paramour. His duplicity in this affair gnawed at him day and night. Secrets and lies. Many times, he’d felt he should end it right now. But somehow she always worked her magic.

  Keep her stashed upstairs until Lord Hawke was gone. At which point he would tell her it was over between them. And now that Blackie was back in Washington, their relationship must always remain a secret. Hawke would do that very thing.

  And suddenly he knew he couldn’t do it.

  The doorbell now sounded its
deep tolling chime down in the front hall and reverberated up the elegant curving and freestanding staircase that soared to the second and third floors, just as Winnie’s big blues popped wide open.

  “Darling,” she said, “where on God’s green earth are you going at this hour? Do come back to bed, won’t you, please, with sugar on top? You won’t be sorryyyy. . . .”

  “I don’t understand a thing about you, Win. What is it with you? You go behind your fiancé’s back the second he leaves town? I know your mother is very excited about you marrying a fancy British title. But still . . . why get engaged to a man if you don’t even love him? What’s that all about? I need to know something. What is it you really want? That’s a question. Answer me.”

  “What do I want?”

  “You heard me.”

  “I want the world, damn you. And everything in it. That’s what I want, Mr. Ambassador. Now, get back in this bed and make Mama happy, mister.”

  “I’ll do no such thing. You see, your precious fiancé has just arrived back from England and is now standing down at my front door, very persistently ringing my bell. So, I’m going down to see what he wants. And I want you to go back to sleep and stay out of sight upstairs for as long as he’s here. Not a word out of you. You hear me? Not a bloody peep.”

  “You need to calm down, Tiger. Don’t worry about it! I can handle him.”

  “‘Handle him’? He may well shoot you if he sees you here with me at seven o’clock in the morning! Hell, he might shoot both of us! Listen to me, young lady. I don’t imagine either of us would savor what is sure to be, if not an awkward moment, most certainly one that will cause great pain to the offended party, the only innocent party here, the man who entrusted the care of you to me, once, and formally, his best friend. My friendship with Blackie is important to me. We’re rather like brothers at this point. I won’t let you ruin that for him or me. Promise me you’ll stay right here.”

  She sighed, pulled the covers over her head, and uttered the muffled words, “I promise, Daddy.”

  “And, for heaven’s sake, stop calling me Daddy. I am not your father. Thank God! I’d be married to that harridan mother of yours!”

  Rattled by his conflicting emotions, and descending the elegant curving suspended staircase, he reflected on the fact that in two days he’d be leaving Washington on the presidential yacht, headed for points north as a member of FDR’s much ballyhooed fishing expedition. And following that trip, he’d been invited down to Warm Springs, Georgia, to spend the long holiday weekend with the president.

  It was only then that Tiger recalled the very painful and very dangerous situation that, thanks to his godforsaken father, he now found himself in. Chiang Kai-shek had ordered him to assassinate the very man he served. A man he had come to not only revere, but someone for whom he now felt something distinctly akin to the love a son might feel for his father.

  Not that he’d know a damn thing about that.

  CHAPTER 39

  Sevenoaks Plantation, Virgina

  February 1942

  His upcoming presidential travel invitations, Tiger considered, were two particularly convenient ways for him to stay well off the social radar for a few weeks. Take this romantic pot of his off the boil, he thought, and see what happened between the happy couple. Now, in his current situation, he was actually glad he’d accepted the fishing trip invitation, as well as a long, relaxing train ride down to Warm Springs, Georgia, deep in the heart of the southland.

  Padding down the marble staircase, Tiger was feeling, more than ever, suffocated by this bewitching woman of his. He needed air and a whole lot of space. His nerves were frayed to the breaking point, and it was not a good feeling, not even close. Sometimes, when he felt he couldn’t stand another minute of her company, he’d realized he couldn’t stand the idea of breaking it off between them. He had never in his life met a woman this wanton, this libidinous. How to deal with her would require what they called at Oxford, Occam’s razor. Usually in Latin, of course. “Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate,” or something like that. His Latin, never a strong suit, but still able to dredge up a translation. “Plurality must never be posited without necessity.” KISS, or Keep it simple stupid, as the Americans would have it.

  There was a simple solution to the Woolworth dilemma: Bid her a fond farewell.

  He stood before the closed front door for a few seconds and tried to compose himself. He mentally pictured himself as a man overjoyed to see Commander Hawke standing there in the cold. His lordship was a dear friend whom he’d worried he’d never see alive again. And a man whom he’d repeatedly betrayed with his fiancée. Stop the madness! he shouted to himself. Take control, damn you!

  He took a deep breath and reached for the door handle. “Ready? Set? Go!” he said to himself, and grabbed the door handle with a will and pulled open the fifteen-foot-high oaken door, swinging it wide.

  Hawke stood there on the icy steps, puffing a cigarette while staring at a brilliant red cardinal perched atop the snowy bough of an old Japanese maple tree, and looked around to see his friend standing in the open doorway, still in his pj’s and quilted burgundy velvet smoking jacket with matching monogrammed slippers.

  “Hawke! As I live and breathe!”

  “Tiger,” Hawke said with a warm smile, letting the word hang there between them.

  “If it isn’t his lordship in the flesh, safely home from the war! I shall henceforth consider all my prayers answered!”

  Hawke returned the smile and said, “Hello, old boy! Sorry to come knocking at such a beastly hour on a Sunday. . . . Please, forgive me, Tiger. May I come in? Bit chilly out here, to be honest.”

  Tiger, slightly embarrassed by his lack of courtesy, stepped back into the entry hall and bowed, welcoming him inside with both arms extended.

  Tiger said, “You’re looking none the worse for wear, old bean. Clearly, secret commando raids on the Hun agree with you. . . . Come on back to the library. Hamish already has a wood fire going and a pot of coffee brewing. Unless my nose deceives me, I can smell them both.”

  “‘Lay on, Macduff’!” Hawke said. “‘And damn’d be him who first cries, ‘Hold, enough’!”

  Tiger laughed and said, “Macbeth, act five, scene eight!”

  Hawke stopped dead in his tracks. He asked, “You actually know that? No one knows that. No one I know, anyway.”

  “The two of us do! Isn’t that enough? A couple of old veterans of Cambridge, Oxford, and the English public school system?” Tiger asked, reasonably enough.

  Proceeding with his guest into the book-lined library, Tiger took the nearest of the two faded leather club chairs to either side of the hearth. He let himself simply breathe for a moment. The air in this room was perpetually redolent of ancient leather-bound volumes: Samuel Pepys, Pliny the Elder, Aristotle, and of course, Edward Gibbon and his dogeared copy of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Yes, all this and the complete red leather collections of Dickens, Conan Doyle, and a good deal more.

  Also, there was always the vague olfactory history of Balenciaga and other popular women’s parfums parisiennes of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, not to mention woodsmoke, and hundred-year-old velvet draperies so full of old dust and dirt that an archaeologist would have had a field day studying the things. And the even older leather furniture, gallons of dog pee and of spilled whiskey, and of course, fromage, the dominant aroma being that of an overripe Stilton from long ago and paired with a delicious dollop of Taylor’s Reserve Port, put down in 1935.

  Heaven on earth, in other words.

  Hawke followed Tiger into the room and sat himself down in the matching opposite chair. He said, “I now know why you so love this room, Tiger. You’re very lucky to have this sancturary to escape to when you need it. I envy you a bit, old boy.”

  Tiger replied, “Couldn’t agree more.
I’ve dreamed of a room just so for all of my adult life. So, tell me, dear Blackie, when did you arrive back upon these verdant shores?”

  “Arrived on the liner from Southampton night before last. Took the train down from Penn Station in New York yesterday morning. Arrived here at Union Station in time for a homecoming lunch held for me at the Cosmos Club. You were invited. I was sorry to see you couldn’t make it.”

  Tiger leaned forward and gave his friend his most earnest and appealing look. “As was I, as was I!” he said, “I had planned on attending, to be honest. But yesterday morning, I was summoned down to the stables as one of my favorite horses, Pale Rider, was taken during the night by some strange illness. Annie Fleming, our local vet, arrived at lunchtime to have a look. Said she’d never seen anything like it. Pulmonary, she thought. That the stallion should be carefully monitored for any signs of worsening. . . .”

  Hawke said, “I’m so sorry. I know how you love that old horse. How is he doing?”

  “Much improved when I went down to the stables last evening. Whatever the doctor has given him, it seems to be working. Thank God. So, what brings you out to the sticks on a cold and wet Sunday morning?”

  “It’s Winnie. I’ve looked high and low. I’ve been calling her Georgetown flat number and the one here in the country and getting no answer. I wanted to let her know I was back in Washington and wanted very much to see her. Celebrate my safe return or something like that. . . . Finally, in a bit of desperation, I called her mother and asked where she was.

  “I was told she’d met some friends the night before at the Sagamore Hill Winter Dance and was going to the house of one of them for the night. Saying she’d be home for breakfast. But she never showed up. ‘I honestly have no idea where she might be,’ her mother said. ‘She does this from time to time even though she knows it enrages her father.’ At any rate, have you heard from her lately? Do you have any idea where she might have got to?”