The Mammoth Book of Short Spy Novels (Mammoth Books) Read online

“But I mean – ” she went on falteringly, “has it got a radio, anything like that?”

  He stopped short, and the air between them was filled with sudden tension.

  “What made you ask that?” he said in a cold, wary voice.

  “Well,” she said plausibly, “we can’t make love all the time. We can’t drink all the time. We can’t eat all the time. I simply wondered if there was something to help pass the time away, if I did decide to stay with you.

  He relaxed again. “Oh, I didn’t get you for a minute.”

  She knew enough not to ask the question a second time, and finally he said, of his own accord but a trifle reticently, “Yeah, it’s got a radio.”

  “What are you put out about, Johnnie?”

  “Well, y’know, your asking that isn’t exactly a compliment to me,” he said sulkily. “You worried I won’t keep you busy enough? Don’t worry, baby, you won’t need any music out there with me. We’ll make our own.”

  “Johnnie!” she reproached. “Wait for me here a minute,” she said then, smiling shyly. “I’ll be right back. I’ll have to telephone home and make up some excuse to tell my family.”

  In the dressing room she motioned the maid out, closed the door and picked up the phone, all in one swift motion.

  “Tomiko. Colonel Setsu, official business.”

  Setsu’s voice came on with uncanny quickness, almost as though he’d had his hand ready on the instrument.

  They didn’t waste time exchanging names.

  “He has a little bungalow on the Peninsula,” she began in a low-voiced rush. “It has a radio. He’s taking me there now. Do I refuse, do I delay, do I go at once – your order?”

  “How did he react about the radio?”

  “He stopped short. His pride as a man rebelled that I should ask about outside entertainment.”

  Colonel Setsu had the sixth sense typical of the good Secret Service man. “He is the right one,” he said instantly. “That was not his pride as a man, that was his caution as a secret agent.”

  “Then I go?”

  “Absolutely essential. It will have to be in your own hands entirely, at first. It may take all night until I can identify the exact location and have my men reach there. Report back as soon as you safely can. But be very careful. One thing I must warn you about – ”

  Lyons was standing in the dressing room doorway, looking at her. She had not heard the door open.

  “Good-bye, honorable father,” she said, and hung up.

  She turned to him with a dazzling smile.

  “What’d they say?” he grunted.

  “What does any family in any part of the world say when the eldest daughter tells them she is spending the night with a girl friend? They think they know, they’re afraid they’re right, but they hope they are mistaken.”

  She shrugged as she turned toward the door. “Well, Johnnie. Here goes nothing.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” he said, tightening his arm possessively around her waist. “I wouldn’t say that at all!”

  When she awoke in the morning he wasn’t in the bed with her and wasn’t in the room.

  The overturned goblets, the empty champagne bottles in the bucket, floating now in water that had once been chopped ice, told the story of their night. Successful from his point of view, barren from hers. She hadn’t learned a thing more than she’d already known in the city.

  She put on a man’s black silk kimono she saw lying there – his, for she hadn’t brought anything of her own with her – and ran to the window.

  The view from the little country house was as beautiful as a Japanese print. In the foreground were nothing but dwarf fir trees, glossy and dark green. Beyond and below them the pebbly beach, rosy-beige in color. And then past that the waters of the bay, an incomparable blue. Out from the shore a little fishing smack rode motionless, reflected upside down as on a sheet of glass. There was no sign of life aboard it. All under a porcelain-smooth sky.

  No use to search the tiny little two-room place again this morning, even though he wasn’t here. She had done that exhaustively during the night, in the intervals between their love-bouts, while pretending to roam aimlessly about.

  She went to the telephone and dispiritedly gave Colonel Setsu’s name.

  “I have failed. I came out here for nothing.”

  “The radio?”

  “It is nothing more than it seems. One of our own inexpensive Japanese makes, table-top, that you can buy in any store.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I have examined it all over. It has no transmitter, messages cannot be sent out over it. The back panel is even broken, which made it easier for me to see inside.”

  “Stay there until you find it,” ordered the Colonel curtly. “It may be right before your eyes and you do not know it.”

  She hung up disconsolately.

  A law of diminishing returns would soon set in, and she knew it. The second night she would already mean less to him than the first, the third night less than the second. Her cards were down, she had nothing left to play with. And his were still being nursed up close to his face.

  She went back to the window. The fishing smack had moved in closer to shore since she had last seen it. And he was standing up on it; she could recognize his tall lanky figure even at that distance. He must have been below somewhere the first time.

  It may be right before your eyes and you do not know it.

  She made a sudden swift turn, as if to go back to the telephone she had just left and pick it up once more, then thought better of it. He would be back to the house in a matter of minutes.

  But she knew where the radio was now. She knew unerringly where he kept it.

  She ran out of the house and down the slope to the beach to meet him, naked as she was under the kimono and in bare feet, uttering gleeful little cries of “Johneee! Johneee!”

  They were both sitting on the edge of the gunwale now, trailing their bare feet in the water. He’d taken off shoes and socks now, too.

  “Why can’t I go down inside the hatch?” she asked for the tenth time.

  “You don’t want to go down there. Nothing but a lot of greasy machinery. Get yourself all dirty.”

  “I bet you’re hiding a woman down there. That’s why you won’t let me see.”

  “I’m a one-woman man. One at a time.”

  “Well then, what are we going to do, just sit here like this soaking our feet? This is no fun. Let’s go in for a swim at least.”

  “I have no suit.”

  “This is the one country in the world where nude bathing isn’t immoral. You ought to know that, foolish one.” Then, to prod him on, she added, “I bet you can’t swim, that’s what it is.’’

  “I swim better than you,” he told her.

  “Prove it then.” That worked. He jumped to his feet, took off everything but his shorts and went arching in in a very graceful dive.

  She promptly flung off the kimono and went in after him.

  They horsed around for a while, laughing and splashing, the way people do in the water.

  “You’re good, you know it?” he spluttered admiringly.

  “At what, this?” she laughed.

  “And a couple of other things.”

  She pretended to tire first, climbed back onto the boat and sat watching him, huddled under the kimono like a towel. As she had half expected, now that he was in, he was enjoying it too much to come right out again. He was only starting to get warmed up now.

  “Swim around the boat,” she suggested, squeezing out her short black hair.

  He went under, bobbed up again. “What’s that,” he scoffed. “That’s no distance.”

  “Do it underwater then. See if you can stay under all the way around it.’’

  He submerged obediently, and the seat of his white shorts went in last, after all the rest of him. Her hand snaked out on the split second almost, and burrowed into the pocket of his trousers, which were spread-eagled within eas
y reach on the deck. No key in the left one. She tried the right. No key in that one, either. But she came out with a crumpled scrap of paper, which he must have forgotten to throw away. On it, in lead pencil, were two rows of words printed in capital letters. A message that must have gone out over the transmitter.

  It was scrambled, didn’t make sense. That didn’t matter, it was the evidence she’d been sent out to get, and Setsu would know how to have it decoded.

  She had no place to hide it. The kimono had no pockets, and she was nude under it.

  She snatched a cigarette from the pack he’d left lying on the deck, rolled the paper quickly around the outside of it, blank-side out, and stuck it between her lips. Then she deliberately threw the accompanying paper match folder into the water, just as his head broke surface and a thin sheet of water went streaming down in front of his face.

  “Didn’t think I could do it, did you?” he panted breathlessly.

  “Johnnie, I’m going back now – I’m starting to shiver,” she said. “It’s October, after all. You bring the kimono back with you.”

  She knew he’d have to rest on the boat, if only a minute or two, after his underwater exertions.

  And, without giving him a chance to object or stop her, she slipped back into the water just as he hauled himself up out of it right alongside of her. But not before she glimpsed the key to the hatch fastened by a safety pin to the waistband of his shorts, around at the side.

  Timing is everything, particularly in moments of crisis. Timing is life and death.

  She could have made it half a dozen times over if she’d only worked out her time better. He was still on the boat, hadn’t left it, when she looked back from the doorway as she reentered the house.

  But she was dripping wet, freezing, and shaking uncontrollably all over. She had to rub herself off first and put on some things, and it was that that undid her. Had she gone straight to the telephone just as she was, she probably could not have made herself understood through her chattering teeth. Nor, on the other hand, could she have gone directly to the car and driven naked like that all the way in to Tokyo.

  A precious minute to rub down. A precious minute to put on clothes. An added precious minute for the shoes and stockings – cigarette slipped inside the top of one of them. And a final precious minute to pour out a finger of Hennessy and down it.

  She glanced from the window – and the boat had disappeared. He must have switched on the engine and been bringing it in under its own power. The landing stage was around on the other side and couldn’t be seen from where she was.

  She fled to the phone, still gambling on her timing – “Tomiko for Colonel Setsu, urgent, urgent!” – and her timing had run out. He was standing there in the outside doorway, looking in at her.

  She turned, smiled innocently, and then hung up. He smiled back; he didn’t appear to be suspicous or ill-tempered or anything.

  “What’d you do, drop my matches in the water, you little devil?” he reproved her.

  He lit a cigarette from a lighter first, and then helped himself in turn to the Three-Star Hennessy.

  “If I’d known you were going to bring the boat in right after I left, I wouldn’t have gotten all wet for nothing, the way I did,” she said.

  He slung one hip onto the edge of a table and nursed his glass. “I always bring it in. What do you think I do, leave it out there all night with nobody on it?” Then, without any change of voice, he asked her, “Who was that you were talking to?”

  “My family, silly. Do you realize this is going to be my second night away from home?”

  “How’d they take it?” he asked, grinning at her knowingly.

  “Not too badly, all things considered.”

  He finished his drink and put down the glass.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you couldn’t reach them – ”

  “But I did,” she quickly interrupted. “I just this minute finished talking to them. You saw me put down the phone.”

  “ – then I still wouldn’t have been sure about you, one way or the other. At least not sure enough to do anything to you. But you lied to me about it – ”

  “Lied?” she breathed.

  “Because I cut the wires outside the house myself just now as I came in. So you couldn’t have been talking to anybody – that’s a dead phone. And, by lying to me, now you have made me sure of you. That makes all the rest of it hang together. The matches thrown in the water, so there’d be no risk of having to smoke away the evidence. Going down into the water with a cigarette held in your mouth. Doing the dog-paddle on the way back instead of your regular stroke, so you could keep it dry. One trouser leg was flipped over when I went to put them back on. I’d left them both pasted down flat on the deck. You’d been in my pockets. Little things. But it’s the little things in my line of work that count.”

  She made one last gamble. One final one. She had the long, strong legs of a dancer, good for running. The car was only a few yards down the road, in the open; there was no such thing as a garage out here. He had a habit of leaving the keys sticking in it nine times out of ten – she’d been out in it with him enough to know that. About things that didn’t directly concern his work he was apt to be careless, even slipshod. And finally, last night during her roving she had noticed that the key was standing in the lock on the other side of the door between the two rooms here.

  So she threw the dice – winner take all. What else could she do?

  “This conversation isn’t helping me get any warmer,” she said, shuddering. “I could use one more drink.”

  She went toward the hefty cognac bottle, empty glass in hand.

  Still half sitting, he had turned to watch her, so she couldn’t try to hit him over the head; he could catch it in time. Instead she let the glass go, grabbed the bottle by the neck with both hands and rammed it, bottom-first, square into his face with all her might. It was the equivalent of a good man-driven punch in the nose, if nothing else, and it stunned him for a minute and opened his lip.

  Then she ran like one possessed, slammed the door, turned the key in it and fled from the house, down the road – and all the gods of old Japan and all the ghosts of ancient warriors must have been rooting for her.

  She flung herself in the car, without bothering to shut the door. The keys were in it, and she turned on the ignition and floored the starter . . .

  He didn’t bother with the room door. He leaped out the window and cut through the dwarf firs diagonally for the car . . .

  The motor turned over once, turned over twice, failed.

  He had her.

  “C’mon back, baby,” he said, wrapping her in a double-armed bear hug and lifting her bodily out of the car. He dragged her back toward the cabin, breathing heavily. “I don’t know whether to love you or kill you.” He laughed harshly. “Why not both?”

  Her timing was what had destroyed her. It had worked out all wrong.

  Her eyes remained closed for some time after. She almost seemed to be in a faint, from overemotion. When she stirred at last and opened her eyes, he was all the way across the room from her. He had a closet door open and was standing by it, his hand inside the pocket of an old gabardine topcoat that was hanging there.

  She tried to sit up, failed, then succeeded.

  “Wasn’t it good?” she whispered exhaustedly, as though seeking to determine her own fate by the answer.

  “Sure. Out of this world. That’s why I’m sending you there with it.”

  She dropped her eyes demurely. “In Japan there are many old arts. Making love is one of them.”

  “Ready, baby?” was all he said.

  The gun came out.

  She looked at him without expression. “Dying is another of our arts,” she said.

  Outside the house there was a guttural shout of command. Then running feet started to converge on it from all sides, dozens of them it seemed, pattering over grass, scraping over gravel, slapping over flagstones.

  The gun je
rked spasmodically.

  “I was almost going to let you go there for a minute,” he confided rapidly. “But this does it.”

  They weren’t in time. He was too close, and they were too far.

  He aimed at her face first, but then changed his mind, as though thinking it was too beautiful to spoil. He lowered it to her heart instead, and the bullet slammed her backward. The blood came out with an effect almost like an iridescent, finespun garden spray revolving on the grass, until she clapped both hands over it to try to hold it in. Then it simply ran down flat against her skin.

  She toppled over sideward on the bed, and dropped from there to the floor, limp as a drunk.

  Then they were in. They poured in like water through a sieve. They even seemed to come through the walls.

  He tried to point it at his own head, but his immunity had run out, and they caught it from him and bore him down.

  Then Colonel Setsu strode in, dress-uniform sword at his side. “Help this woman,” he ordered, pointing.

  She made a warding-off gesture with one hand, its palm out toward them, shiny orange-red with her own blood but the creases in it still white.

  Then she lifted herself – agonizedly, by sheer will power, almost miraculously – grasping the bed until she stood fully erect for a moment, for a moment only.

  Not to face them, for her face turned straight upward overhead, to where Ameratsu the sun goddess, ancestress of all Japan, blazed in all her glory.

  “For the divine Emperor I die!”

  Then she fell and died there.

  “Tomiko!” cried Colonel Setsu in a ringing voice, holding his sword upright before his face in salute. “Let every man remember her name and tell it to his sons. Let every man look upon her face and behold true love of country.”

  They all bowed their heads mutely for a long moment.

  Then Johanie Lyons was hustled violently out, staggering from side to side with the fury of their hatred.

  The cell door grated open at the usual time, but instead of the guard with the daily tin breakfast tray, the Commandant of Sugamo Prison himself entered, holding two official-looking documents in his hand.