The Kiwi Contract Read online

  The Kiwi Contract

  A Joe Gall Mystery

  Philip Atlee

  For the finest kiwis I know,

  Vi and Tom Carr of Wellington

  Chapter 1

  I was waiting for a ship which was overdue. The M. V. Cape Juba, out of Hamburg, had been delayed in British Columbia ports while loading paper pulp for Australia and New Zealand. A freighter carrying twelve passengers, reputedly in style, the Juba was supposed to dock in San Pedro at six o’clock on this afternoon of my discontent.

  San Pedro, California, is a carbuncle which has burst but not been cleansed. It is an unlovely seaport choked by freeways, containing every known method of pollution. One of those unplanned excrescences spawned by Los Angeles, headquarters for American bad taste. Exhaust fumes linger in its streets like foul perfume. Smokestacks belch more impurities into the air, ships in the harbor foul the brown water, and ancient pumping wells contribute to the miasma.

  I had been holed up in this dingy paradise for nearly a week, not very comfortably. There were no decent hotels in San Pedro, so I had spent the time in a second-rate motel where they had a lock on the ice machine. This was because the polyglot population of the port—poor white, black, and Mexican-American—held a high percentage of thieves. When nothing else was available, they would steal ice cubes. Or the entire machine.

  As I walked along South Pacific Avenue toward the shuttle bus to the harbor, I noticed the jaundiced clouds overhead, a yellowish bubble sealing off the city. Before I learned that the steamship agency in Los Angeles was lying to me, I had taken several seven-dollar cab rides down to the pier. Even on an unlimited expense account that is silly when you can make the same round trip for less than a dollar in buses.

  When I was a half-block from the bus stop, a slender young man catapulted from a dimly lit bar doorway and crashed into an overflowing refuse container. He had obviously been hurled out of the intimate sewer with the sour smell. The kind of smell you get in a place where the larger lumps are swept out every day, but no sunlight ever hits the patrons.

  The ejectee was stoned but not downhearted. He sat sprawled back against the garbage can and adjusted his grimy puce ascot. Noticing that I had stopped and was regarding him, he smoothed back his long locks with both hands and said archly, “Well, hello, Dolly! What marvelous shoulders you have …”

  People hurried by, scuttling homeward, parcel laden under the poisoned sky, taking no notice, except when they stumbled over his outstretched legs. Then they cursed him briefly without heat and continued their finite errands. The bright-eyed boy suggested that he and I go back into the bar and discuss conditions. Of what, he didn’t specify.

  “They don’t seem to want you in there,” I pointed out, and he pouted pouf, looking exhausted but serene.

  “It’s only Claud,” he explained, “and he’s such a shit.”

  I nodded and in a civil tone informed him that I was one of the founding fathers of the Mattachine Society, San Francisco chapter, and that he was making our whole movement a farce. Soliciting in a public street, etc….

  The slender boy’s jaw went slack with astonishment; he considered me. Then began to roar with laughter, kicking his legs and banging his head back against the trash can. Howling for “Claud!” to come out of the bar…. A shuttle bus to the harbor came, and as I boarded it, he was still shouting behind me.

  “A straighter arrow than J. Edgar the Hoover …”

  I have nothing against these people, but I wouldn’t want my brother to marry one of them.

  As twilight lengthened over San Pedro, a cold wind began to flourish discarded newspapers along the waterfront. Many of the storefronts were boarded up, but there were two pawnshops open, a liquor store, and several bars in the dive class. These bore flickering neon signs welcoming seamen in Scandinavian, German, and Greek. As I walked across the street toward the other bus stop, I kicked aside the shards of a vodka bottle.

  I passed an abandoned car, bereft of wheels but not of passengers. Grounded, it served as a shelter for three winos in filthy clothes, but their staring eyes did not really record my passage. The bus fare to the Wilmington pier or at least to the nearest point to it, was thirty-one cents. I paid and sat for five minutes listening to the young Mexican driver question his associate, an older driver going off duty, about the glories of belonging to a Masonic lodge.

  The older driver was emphasizing that you had to have moral qualifications in order to take this momentous step. Three miles later, after the bus had gone curving around the harbor and its unlovely environs, I dropped off and went into a bar across the street. It had a Greek name, was bare and cavernous, and the bartender and three lounging customers were talking Greek. I ordered a Coke, paid the quarter requested, and found the drink lukewarm. After one sip I put it down on the scarred bar top and walked out again.

  I walked by closed machine shops, ship’s chandlers, and was passing a fenced boatyard which held damaged small craft when I had company. The company was an old German shepherd bitch with heavy, swinging dugs. She paced along beside me toward the darkening harbor, past the tracts of pumping oil wells which leaked a sulphurous odor.

  I thought that the old dog must belong to one of the pumpers or night watchmen living in the nearby shacks and that she was just checking me through her territory. When I turned onto the wide avenue leading to the pier, walking between mountains of marine shipping containers, she continued pacing beside me. An old dog, grizzled, but she had good conformation and must have been a handsome lady once. I wondered where her pups were and why she was going so far afield from them.

  This trip I was not disappointed. As I rounded the corner of the warehouse in near darkness, the lighted length of the Cape Juba was being warped into the pier by two tugs. The pierside lights of the warehouse flashed on, and I watched the forward and aft lines being secured. The gangplank came rattling down jerkily, and three cars rolled past me and stopped at its end.

  Their uniformed occupants—customs, quarantine, and immigration officers—went up the metal rungs of the gangplank and vanished. From an inner warehouse office the ship’s agents went aboard. The tugs hooted and disengaged themselves with a stern boil, and I waited in the shadows just beyond the warehouse.

  Ten minutes later a young German in a white coat came down the gangplank and hurried toward me. He was Eric Monoschein, chief steward of the Cape Juba. He glanced at the old dog, motionless beside me, and nodded. We did not shake hands. When he reported, his English was good but heavily accented.

  “The man’s cabin, a double for which he paid double for single occupancy, was booked from Vancouver to Auckland. He did not board in Vancouver, but I had a cable there saying he would pick us up later. To keep the cabin reserved for him. We went to Tahsis to load paper pulp, to Victoria, on Vancouver Island, for general cargo. He did not show up. We were in Seattle for three days; no sign of him.”

  “When you leave here, no other ports until Sydney, Australia?”

  “Right. Eighteen days.”

  “Where’s the cable he sent you?”

  “In my cabin. I didn’t think to—”

  I didn’t comment, and the young German half turned, saying he would go fetch the message. When I nodded, he took off in a high lope. It’s money makes the mare go … I had lighted a small cigar when a white Cadillac came rolling swiftly around me and stopped behind the other cars. A uniformed driver got out and began to unload a matched set of luggage and several cartons from the trunk of the big car.

  I moved around the corner of the warehouse to get closer, staying under the shadowed roof. There was a case of Chivas Regal, another of Jack Daniels’ sourmash, and two of Schweppes soda. I could not see into the back seat of the car; the curtains were drawn. The driver took off up the gangplank, and I could tell from the way he footed its rungs that he was an athlete or had been.

  Fifteen minutes later the driver came bouncing down and strode back to the white Cadillac. He withdrew from the trunk what looked like a giant puzzle of folded chrome tubes. When he got through adjusting it, the puzzle turned into a portable wheel chair. He tested it carefully, ran it back and forth on rubber wheels, and leaned into the back seat.

  This time he emerged holding a man wrapped in a blanket. I couldn’t tell much about his size. The driver lowered the wrapped man gently into the wheel chair, rolled it twenty feet to a cargo-loading palette, and set it down on the steel frame. A winch whined above, and when its dangling hook came down, a longshoreman was there to steady it in the palette lines. The winch whined again, and the motionless man in the wheel chair was hoisted smoothly up to the passenger deck.

  That put him out of my sight. I was toeing out the little cigar when there was a rasping touch on the outside of my right hand. The old dog had licked me there, and I was not pleased. In my mind the dog was in the same category as the grounded queer outside the San Pedro bar. Nothing wrong with them but nothing to me.

  Ten minutes more and the young chief steward came hurrying down the gangplank again. He approached me, holding out the folded cablegram, and said, “This is the man.”

  I put the cablegram in my pocket. “I had no information that he was crippled.”

  “Nor we,” said Monoschein earnestly. “But he had a lot of doctor’s reports. From the Mayo Clinic. The captain read them and decided to take him.”

  I nodded. “Thirty days to Auckland, then?”

  “If there’s no rain in Sydney,” answered Monoschein. “We’ve a lot of cargo for there.”


  I handed him the folded bank notes which would double his salary for the month, and he thanked me and went back up the lighted gangplank. Turning, I walked through the badly lighted dockside streets to the bus stop for San Pedro. I was standing on the deserted corner with the old dog beside me when a pickup with a high-built back end came cruising down the street and stopped.

  A beefy young man in his late twenties got out and came around toward me with a coil of rope in his hand. He looked like a highschool fullback from a losing team, going to beer fat.

  “Your dog?” he asked.

  “No. I got off the bus here an hour ago and walked down to a pier. She followed me.”

  He nodded his heavy head judicially and leaned down to pat the grizzled old bitch’s head while searching for a collar and license tag. She had neither. I glanced again at the back end of the pickup; there were four heavy wire cages built onto it, two on each side.

  The beefy boy kept crooning to the old dog. Then he suddenly whipped three loops of the rope around her graying muzzle, locking her jaws tight. Reaching back, he unlatched a door to the nearest wire cage. When he lifted her, she was trying to fight back, snarling, and her milk-filled dugs were spilling over his brawny forearms.

  He slammed her into the wire-mesh cage and latched the metal door. The mesh was so thick I couldn’t see her anymore, but she was still snarling and fighting the cage.

  “Man,” I protested, “she’s got pups somewhere around here. They’ll die.”

  “That’s right. Makes my job easier …” Beefy Boy was climbing back behind the wheel. “We’ll keep her in the pound for eight days; that’s the law, mister. To see if anybody wants to adopt her. But I give you my promise, nobody wants a dog this old and ugly.”

  He drove off, cruising slowly, looking for more dog victims. The bus came ten minutes later and was filled with drunken sailors of several nationalities. When I transferred to the shuttle bus, it was nearly nine o’clock. Getting off on South Pacific Avenue, I called the Washington, D.C., number from a pay booth, and the impersonal voice answered.

  I said that the man we were concerned with, or someone holding his ticket, had boarded the Cape Juba. That the German freighter would make no other ports before Sydney. Eighteen days. That the passenger was in a wheel chair but had been cleared by the captain for passage to Auckland.

  When the recording pinged off, I walked the three blocks back to the ratty motel. My high-strung friend was no longer sprawled on the sidewalk, so I assumed that he and Claud had patched up their differences.

  Chapter 2

  I waited another two nights in the dingy motel room, leaving it only to eat and buy newspapers. Shortly after noon on the third day the phone in the booth beside the swimming pool rang, and I answered it quickly. The accented voice of Chief Steward Monoschein announced that the gangplank on the Cape Juba was going up in fifteen minutes and that the man was still on board.

  Thanking him, I hung up and in half an hour was in a cab rolling toward Los Angeles’ International Airport San Pedro’s yellow sky fell behind me. I was lucky at the airport; Pan American had a first-class seat on a flight to Sydney; it departed at five minutes before midnight

  I paid cash for a one-way ticket and then had to part with another small bundle for an air fare from Australia to American Samoa. This was an occupational hazard; because I could not show continuing passage out of Sydney, I had to buy the other ticket.

  This continuing passage business could be a pain in the ass for a man on uncertain errands. In Antigua once, a pompous black man had refused to issue me a ticket on a Caribbean ship because of it. When I told him to give me the economy airfare to St. Croix (only sixty-six dollars), he nearly had hydrophobia. Demanded that I buy a return to New Orleans, from which point I had left the States. It was only when I said I would take the matter to Mr. Bird, the island dictator, that he released my tickets.

  Before leaving his counter, I got his solemn promise that if I did not use the St. Croix air ticket, I could redeem it in Yank dollars, the same currency I had paid for it. In Barbados three months later the government officially refused to honor his promise so I took the ticket into the black market and lost only twenty percent of its value. Biwi dollars, the currency of the black Caribbean states, are discounted heavily outside of those islands.

  When I boarded the Australia flight that night, I found that the first-class ticket I had been so lucky to get had also been discounted. There were only five other passengers in the first-class section. No matter. As the big jet climbed to cruising altitude, I was reflecting that I would be in Sydney in seventeen hours.

  The Cape Juba would not make that port for two and a half weeks.

  Chapter 3

  My real name, which never appears on the passports I carry, is Joseph Liam Gall. I am a counterintelligence agent, working only on individual contracts for a large US agency. Reduced to simpler terms, I am a brigand sent to skulk in foreign alleys with a specific assignment. This means that I usually change existing conditions and sometimes leave gaping holes in the landscape.

  My work has nothing to do with pilfering papers from wastebaskets or cracking codes. Sneakier and more cerebral types go through those motions. I am usually the last shot in the locker. After sweet reason and diplomatic finesse have failed, they send for the sonsofbitches, and I rank high in that category. So I suppose you could say that I am an environment changer and a time gainer for my country.

  Through the years I have spent going out on assignments, it has repeatedly occurred to me that the changes I make are largely ephemeral. No lasting benefit is gained. But such evaluations are beyond my scope; they must continue to be the province of the policy makers. As a takeout artist, I do what I am told and get highly paid for my services.

  I was a Marine Corps captain in the Second War To End All and a major in the Korean conflict. After being invalided out of the Changjin Reservoir operation and narrowly escaping amputation of my left foot, I spent a few years in civilian life but didn’t like it much. When I was recruited by the agency, I still had limited motion in the left ankle but was otherwise fit. I worked all around the world and got on well enough until I told some august planners that the proposed Bay of Pigs invasion was bound to be a disaster.

  When it turned out to be just that, the high brass and the civilians playing superspook went looking for a whipping boy. I was available and, for my temerity in being right, got my ass fired.

  Life is mostly sorrow, but as they say down at the Rotary Club, you must keep your eye upon the donut and not upon the hole. Since I had spent so much of my life outside the United States, now I retreated as far into it as I could get. That meant the purchase of a remote Ozark hill with a dilapidated clapboard castle on it.

  The old house stood on the crest of the hill, shadowed by a tall stand of virgin pine. Built in the aftermath of the Civil War by a carpetbagger general named Powell Clayton, the structure had solid foundations, fourteen-foot ceilings, and stained glass windows on all three floors. Turrets and chimneys made it look like something out of a grim fairy tale. On the western slope beside it, a spring-fed waterfall cascaded icy water down the hillside.

  I dammed the bottom of the slope to create a lagoon and in the next few years created an Edo period garden on the far side of the pool, complete with black bamboos. There was a grotto under the waterfall, and I built a redwood sauna hut in it. My savings went into restoring the old wooden castle, doing the donkey work myself and calling in contractors only when I was out of my depth.

  While the stately mansion was being restored, I never once used local labor. The nearest village was four miles away, but I knew that if I hired any of the chill-eyed natives, there would be no more secrets on my hilltop. So my contracted work was done from Tulsa or St. Louis, and materials were trucked in from those places. In addition, I did not buy any groceries in the nearby village or get any mail there.

  The day came, finally and to my enormous satisfaction, when the clapboard castle was fully restored. The furniture in it was massive, solid walnut, and the whole place had been rewired. A Delco generator stood ready to handle the electrical load if the local power line failed. In the basement I had a dojo gymnasium, a walk-in freezer room, and a greenhouse with wide western windows. The mushroom beds had electronically controlled temperature and moisture, and on the meadow to the east were both rifle and pistol ranges.