by John Boyd
“He’s expert in every known method of killing a man, and there are several methods not yet published that he holds the copyright on. He has committed murder by suicide. In Hanoi once he hypnotized a French secret agent and had him commit hari-kari by autosuggestion on a stage before an audience. The fastidious little bastard was so confident of his powers as a hypnotist that he even provided a bowl for the Frenchman to disembowel himself into.
“An illusionist, he can merge into any background, emerge, strike, then fade away. He’s master of the diabolical plot and a genius at sinister intrigue, but that which makes Huan Chung the world’s greatest superspy is his mastery of the art of disguise. If you think Kyra is lovely, you should see Huan Chung gussied up as Mrs. Huan Chung. Kyra in her Polinski Creation is to Huan Chung in drag what Sammy Davis, Junior, is to Diahann Carroll.
“Back when I worked for the CIA, my man in Hong Kong once hired a Chinese stenographer, a petite, almond-eyed little babe built like a sandalwood outhouse. He fell in love with the Chinese doll and for three weeks the romance went along hot and heavy until the doll got the combination of his safe and made off with our Asian code books. In the safe where the code books had been, she left a memento, a black lotus.
“She was Huan Chung pulling his sleight-of-end trick. My man had been so diverted and beguiled between the sheets he never noticed that his Oriental nifty had balls. We had to lead him out of the cold by his hand. His career was ruined, but that did not bother him as much as his broken heart. He had fallen in love, and he never recovered from the fickleness and infidelity of Huan Chung, truly a master of disguise.”
The tale ended in a look of awe on the teller’s face, and Breedlove asked, “Aren’t you laying it on a little thick, Slade?”
“No. Hyperbole is understatement when you speak of Huan Chung… I want you to study these coconut trees, Breedlove. Count them. Notice their size and shape—”
“Wait a minute! You aren’t telling me—”
“I’m telling you Huan Chung is a contortionist. He can coil himself in a ball and disguise himself as a coconut until he’s ready to backflip onto the balcony. We’d better get in. I’ve got to break the news to the boys about their new visiting hours.”
Inside, Kyra had rummied, and the laughter, general gaiety, and the sunlight flooding the room made for anything but a dismal scene, yet it seemed to Breedlove that the tendrils of a fog were coiling into the room, that it was growing darker and clammier. Huan Chung had cast his shadow before him.
“Alone at last,” Kyra sighed as the door closed behind her bodyguard. “And not a minute too soon. I’ve got five hundred years of reading to catch up on.”
She strode to a cabinet now crammed with books, chose one, and returned to the sofa. Glancing over, Breedlove saw it was Gone with the Wind. She became engrossed in the book immediately, but as an object. Slowly turning the pages, she fingered the texture of the paper and admired the typeface and page layout. He sometimes did the same before reading a book.
Glancing toward the balcony, he was reassured by the thick necks of the guards, but only momentarily. A shadow flitted across the balcony, and he flinched, fearing the fall of a coconut and two quick snaps of breaking necks. But it was only Slade’s helicopter, now arriving overhead, which had passed before the sun.
“Breedlove, you’re worried,” she said, without looking up from the book. “What did Ben tell you on the balcony?”
“Just a story. Another one of his originals.”
“About Huan Chung?”
“Yes.”
“And what foo yong did Ben feed my Breedlove about Huan Chung?”
“Slade didn’t tell you, probably because he felt it might frighten you to no purpose, and I have to agree.”
“Oh, fiddle-de-dee! Y’all ought to know if I frightened easily I wouldn’t be here. More likely Ben didn’t tell me because he knows I know when he’s exaggerating. Now, tell me his tale, with all the embellishments.”
He told her the story, but he censored Slade’s comparison of her beauty with that of Huan Chung. When he finished the tale, she lifted her eyes from the book and asked, “Who is Sammy Davis, Junior?”
He told her.
“Is he pretty, witty, and vivacious?”
“Well, he’s witty and vivacious.”
He saw a hurt look in her eyes and rushed to change the subject. “Ben was just using an extreme figure of speech. He likes to impress me with those little verbal tricks. But if you overheard that on the balcony, did you hear what Cohen said to me in the hearing room?”
“Yes, and I think Cohen was right. You shouldn’t try to keep bad news from me. I need to know everything to take countermeasures.”
“If you think Cohen was right, why did you give Slade a vote of confidence when he said he’d get you away by next Friday?”
“That was a countermeasure. Ben is a man of wiles and I was ordering probabilities.” She dropped her eyes back to the book but kept talking to him in a thoughtful vein. “Breedlove, I think Ben created Huan Chung in his own image out of some deep psychic need of his own or to give his men an ideal of perfection in the spy business to strive for. He created Huan Chung from the same need for legendary heroes that made lumberjacks escape their own workaday world with Paul Bunyan or railroad men with Casey Jones.”
“You may be entirely right,” he agreed, surprised by her observation. “Slade probably borrowed Huan Chung from Sax Rohmer, a writer who created an insiduous but wholly fictional Doctor Fu Manchu, another Oriental spymaster.”
She nodded with the pleased, agreeing nod of a schoolteacher complimenting her favorite student. “As many actors have, Ben has an identity problem, and Ben is an actor, perhaps the greatest natural actor since Richard Burbage, but unfortunately he studied dramatics with the CIA. So don’t listen too attentively to everything he says. I wouldn’t put it past him to try and frighten you, because he’s afraid you might want to fly the coop with me some night and take me dancing at Pierre’s. Believe me, I’d be willing, and it would be perfectly safe. If Huan Chung exists, he couldn’t capture me. My evolutionary training would help me avoid the grasp of any man I don’t want grabbing me… By the way, did Slade tell you I wanted to cut back on our socializing?”
“He told me he was going to give you more privacy.”
“Let him have the credit for the idea, but I don’t want Laudermilk bursting into the room at all hours without knocking, and I’m not ready for deification by Little Richard. I declare, they do get tiresome, and if we can’t go dancing at Pierre’s tonight, I want to spend a quiet evening at home with nothing but the backs of our two riflemen for company. Unfortunately we have to make an appearance in the dining room… Breedlove, were you ever on Peachtree Street in Atlanta?”
“No. I’m sorry.”
Her reference was to Gone with the Wind. She wasn’t leafing through it, she was reading it while carrying on a conversation with him, and now she lapsed into silence. Outside, the sound of laughter drifted up from the poolside, and he ignored the sounds, watching her face as she slowly turned the pages. He was seeing a mime show of sadness, mirth, and occasionally the misty-eyed yearnings of romance played out on her face. Fascinated at first by her expressiveness, he slowly began to feel like a voyeur.
Trying not to disturb her concentration, he arose and started from the room, intending to join in the merriment below, but without looking up, she asked, “Are you going down to quaff the nut-brown ale and old?”
“Yes. Care to join me?”
“No. I’m going to finish this terrific story and read War and Peace. Gravy recommended it.”
Below, he found her three guardsmen at a poolside table and joined them. In the pool were several lithely muscled women. “You’re allowing females on the premises,” he said to Slade.
“They’re all cooks and waitresses,” Slade said, “but most of those dolls have earned black belts, so don’t make any sudden moves in their direction.”
“Speaking of dolls,” Laudermilk said, “did I tell you about the fräulein I met in Dresden?”
As a storyteller, Breedlove discovered, Slade had a rival in Laudermilk, although the major’s repertoire was limited to bedroom stories. Yet despite the graphic details they were told with a verve and enthusiasm that lifted them above the merely salacious and claimed even the polite attention of Turpin. In addition, Laudermilk’s detached sense of wonder and artistic appreciation suggested a motivating impulse behind his amours as objective as that of a collector of any exotic erotica, such as Mayan fertility symbols. Some of his lectures were illustrated. He divided women into two categories, good and better, and the latter group he divided into squeezers, twisters, and snappers. The greatest of these were the snappers.
Next to his heart he carried a billfold with a plastic foldout designed for credit cards but carrying photographs of girls, some so young and virginal-looking Breedlove found it difficult to imagine them involved in liaisons without creating statutory problems. The queen of Laudermilk’s “pussy pantheon” was an Italian snapper with the face of an Eleonora Duse.
“Her professional name was Beatrice del Amores, but I called her ‘the Living End.’ She walked with the same twisting sway of Kyra—
“Leave Kyra out of this, Laudermilk!” Turpin blurted in anger.
Slade and Laudermilk glance at the former FBI operative, who seemed suddenly ashamed of his outburst. He continued in a softer tone, “I don’t want to sound strait-laced, Major, but Kyra’s above this sort of talk.”
With fatherly understanding Laudermilk nodded and continued in a sprightly, ruminative tone. “Talking about strait-laced people, I met this pious little thing down around Ben’s country, a choir singer in the Midlands Baptist Tabernacle. She was reverent and modest but built like a Gothic cathedral with a flying buttress that would have made Christopher Wren envious. She had developed this pelvic movement she called ‘the Born-Again Bounce,’ and—”
“Dang it, Laudermilk. You’re just pulling my leg.”
So passed the lazy afternoon, the major regaling them with tales from his latter-day Decameron while the woman who could have given him an unbeatable record as a sexualist finished reading Gone with the Wind and commenced War and Peace before going down to dinner.
Though he was attentive to Laudermilk’s tales, Slade’s eyes kept flicking toward the entrances to the patio, toward the opposite roof, and once he craned his neck to look up at the coconuts on the tree under which they sat. It was then that Breedlove began to wonder again about Slade’s sanity, wonder if his peculiar profession had so warped his sense of reality that he had come to believe his own yarns.
With the commencement of Kyra’s restriction to the motel, Breedlove entered reluctantly a Cloud-Cuckoo-Land of secret agents he considered strictly for The Birds. However personable the men around Kyra might be, he was convinced their attitude was a product of aberrant minds, and to escape momentarily from their influence, to give Kyra solitude for her concentration, and to store up eyewitness accounts of the world outside to relate to her, he began to take walks through the surrounding neighborhood. Along the tree-lined sidewalks he saw nothing more Oriental than a Siamese cat, which he photographed for Kyra. The helicopter, whose maddening drone constantly overhead added its bit to their boredom inside, seemed to follow him in his walks, and he knew he could be under surveillance from the machine. It was not beyond Slade to suspect him of being a double agent—or Huan Chung in disguise.
Once he returned from a walk to find Kyra seated on the side of her bed, gazing wistfully at her favorite dress spread before her. In the pathos of the moment he would have risked the wrath of Slade and spirited her on an outing if they could have eluded the cordon around her stucco castle keep.
Forced into close and continuing proximity to Kyra, he felt his attitude toward her broadening and deepening, and the changes were not all from within. Subtle but profound alterations were occurring in her. The nimbus of femininity always around her grew more alluring, her movements more languid, her voice throatier,—her girlish vivacity seemed to be mellowing into womanhood.
More pronounced than any physical change was her growing humanization, and that was superficially apparent to the entire security squad after she made a bikini-clad entrance into the pool at nine, Saturday morning, by plunging from her balcony railing directly into the water. Only a scattering of people watched her dive then, but Sunday at nine a larger group had gathered, and by Monday there was standing room only at the poolside. Balancing for a few extra seconds on the rail, she obviously enjoyed the calls and wolf whistles from below.
Fawn Davies, the displaced beauty-school student, took to spending almost an hour each evening brushing and styling Kyra’s hair, for Kyra enjoyed the ministrations as fully as any woman of earth.
Breedlove had reason to believe her adaptation to human ways went deeper than the acquisition of feminine attitudes and to feel that a deeper dye of human longings and aspirations was staining her soul. On the first Sunday of her captivity, he directed her to Shakespeare, explaining that a knowledge of the author’s works was the sine qua non to an understanding of English literature. Then he went for a walk until lunch, at which time she told him the Bulfinch helped her understand Shakespeare’s allusions. By dinnertime she had read Shakespeare’s complete works.
He had reservations about the amount of information any speed reader retained, but it would have been presumptuous of him to quiz her. Although Shakespeare’s archaisms were explained in footnotes, he felt she must have had difficulty with his concepts and the rich, compressed Elizabethan style. At dinner she proved he had erred.
Dinner was Kyra’s mandatory public appearance each day at the center table in the interior dining room, surrounded by her bodyguard. Her appearance assured other security personnel, many of whom never saw her during the day, that their ward was alive and well. After Turpin had said grace over the meal, Breedlove remarked, “Gentlemen, we now have with us a Shakespearian scholar. Just before we came down, Kyra read the last line of his last sonnet.”
“I wonder what the last line of the last sonnet is,” Laudermilk said, and Kyra took the remark as a question.
“ ‘Love’s fire heats water, water cools not love,’ ” she answered.
Emboldened by her eagerness and the accuracy of her response, Breedlove plucked one of his favorite lines from memory. “Complete this line, Kyra. ‘On such a night did Dido—’ ”
“Oh, that’s Lorenzo speaking to Jessica in The Merchant of Venice.”
She straightened. Her shoulders leaned slightly forward. She spoke, and her voice, registering a bantering, masculine affection, caught all the flirtatious nuances of the lines as she recited:
“In such a night
Stood Dido with a willow in her hand
Upon the wild sea banks, and waft her love
To come again to Carthage.”
Each man at the table had some literary background. Slade wrote western romances. As an Army officer with little else to do; Laudermilk read extensively, and Turpin could quote the King James Bible at the drop of a fork. Breedlove spent long winters without television and had an English major’s degree from college. The astonishment and pleasure of the four men showed in their eyes.
Measuring the effects of her artistry against her audience, Kyra gained confidence. Leaning back, arching playfully away from the man who had spoken the lines, she became a mocking Jessica, answering:
“In such a night
Did young Lorenzo swear he loved her well,
Stealing her soul with many vows of faith,
And ne’er a true one.”
“Little lady,” Slade said, “I’m inviting you to recite Shakespeare before the whole squad in the theater Monday night. You owe it to your talent to let the people see it.”
“Why, Ben, I’d be right happy to do just that.”
The next morning Breedlove selected her readings from the more familiar passages
of the poet. Looking up from a book on molecular physics she was reading, Kyra noted his selections from the page numbers, but she did not review the lines. Her omission of a rehearsal, which indicated that she could recall the lines, made him aware that her intensive reading was truly an attempt to store in her memory banks all she could gather of the world’s culture and science in order to take the library with her in her mind.
But no computer stood before a tough-minded audience of security people Monday night and brought to it the sadness and laughter her performance evoked. It was the shortest hour Breedlove had ever spent. Kyra’s range of feelings and her ability to project those feelings astonished him as it did the others. She could not have made them feel if she did not possess the feelings herself, and the realization of her transformation, her acquisition of a human heart, as it were, planted the seed of a purpose in his mind.
The memory of the evening helped to soften the news Slade brought to them on Tuesday: the President was still considering Kyra’s petition. There would be no automatic approval.
“It’s a budget problem,” Slade explained. “The value of the uranium is too great for a state gift and too small to be included in any foreign-aid program.”
“Is plutonium cheaper?” Kyra asked. “It would do as well.”
“It’s all restricted, and the price is academic anyhow. The uranium will be on its way by Wednesday. The Government Accounting Office is working out the kinks.”
But on Wednesday the President referred Kyra’s petition to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. Norcross had won the first round. A telephone call from Cohen brought the news to Kyra’s suite before Slade came through the door, disappointed and chagrined over his error in prognostication. Although depressed by the rebuff, Kyra reacted with a sensible question, “When will the joint committee meet?”
