The Ill Wind Contract [Joe Gall 10] Page 2

  "Possibly puromycin has a direct effect on the electrical activity of the brain. It certainly has an amnesiac effect when administered to mice, either before or after training…"

  I tossed the note cards on the teakwood coffee table and looked at Holroyd. Sprawled on his shoulder blades, he shrugged.

  "Beats the hell out of me, pappy," he commented. "I got about a third of it."

  "Okay." I nodded. "Something new and very powerful. Something that induces short-term, or 'labile,' phases of memory-storing."

  "Sure," he said.

  "The notes found in MacBride's room indicated that largo-scale human testing had gone on. I called Dr. Barondes, in Massachusetts, and discussed it with him. He agreed that a number of Japanese scientists were working on the same subject and might have progressed to human tests. But he had not read any literature on it."

  Holroyd nodded and we continued to discuss the experimental drug while I put the steaks on. After we had eaten them, we settled back with a brandy and two of my twisted cheroots.

  "The rest of it is in here," Burt said, pulling a thick envelope from the inside pocket of his jacket. Leaning forward, he dropped the envelope on the edge of the coffee table. "Except that I found out last night, before I flew to St. Louis, who is floating all the bait, from inside Indonesia."

  "Oh?"

  "Yes. A Lieutenant Colonel Abdul Hatta." He heaved up, a lean man with his hands spread in inquiry, and I showed him out to the hall and flipped on the toilet lights. Going back to the living room, I took the littered plates out to the pantry.

  When Holroyd returned from the toilet, I was reading through the dossier on Colonel Hatta for the second time. He was thirty-seven and bore a famous name; his uncle had been, with Sukarno, one of the great Indonesian leaders and patriots. The nephew, however, seemed a much paler carbon copy. He seemed never to have had an important command or staff job, although he had once been detached to serve as operations manager of Garuda Airways. It was not stated, but this indicated that he was a pilot. He had been posted to Sukarnopurna once but seemed a minor figure getting by on the strength of a famous name.

  His latest, and by far most important, duty was to act as liaison officer between the UNESCO restoration mission at Borobodur and the Indonesian Government. Borobodur was the tremendous Hindu ruin, a terraced shrine that was collapsing because of water-weakened foundations. The work on its restoration was estimated to require at least three years, and UNESCO had allotted $4,000,000 and an international stall to the project.

  The photographs of Colonel Hatta were not impressive and I marked him fop. He was a slender man with a slight moustache and in the candid shots he sported an impressive array of teeth. I looked over at Holroyd.

  "No earthshaker, on the strength of this," I commented, and Holroyd shook his head.

  "No, but we can't find where he fits. A pretty good swordsman, works his way through one legong dancing group after another, but his allegiance is obscure. We can't tell who is moving him."

  "And Borobodur, the restoration?"

  "Your cover. You've got a supporting passport in the report there, as chief PRO officer of the project."

  "That's nice," I said. "Would you like to capsule Indonesian politics for me, as of now, in a few minutes?"

  "Why not? Bung Karno. the handsome little man in the black velvet cap, is still riding high. But he operates by whim, playing us off against Peking. He has tapped every available foreign till, by threats and charm, but charisma alone won't pay the bills. The Soviets sold him a fleet of overaged naval vessels and stung his ass good on the price. Then they repented and built him a big sports stadium and complex, including barracks and an adjoining airport, for nothing.

  "So then he switched to Tokyo. He's just juggling, to try to induce more offers, but seems to be sliding to the left. Eight months ago he denounced the United States as leader of the NEOCOLIM group, which translates to neocolonialism and imperialism. Doesn't really favor either side, of course, because he is a classic example of megalomania. But between Nasution, his chief general, and Aidit, leader of PKI, the Indonesian Communist Party, the left is winning."

  "Okay." I poured him another brandy. "About his private life."

  "Gaudy, man!" Holroyd shook his head. "As the disgruntled old uncle said, it you split his head with an ax, all you'd find would be pubic hairs. He tours the world on chartered jets, and host nations throw willing girls at him like you'd slop a hog. In spite of serious kidney trouble, he keeps grunting and humping. There was a story from Vienna last year that he raped a fourteen-year-old girl.

  "Jusuf Muda Dalam is Governor of the Indonesian State Bank, and Sukarno pays the women through him. Tens of them, hundreds of them, sluts and ladies of high rank. The formula is fairly simple and completely criminal, of course. Bung Karno follows what must be a permanent erection: when he has finished with one of his important mistresses, he sends her along to Banker Dalam, where she acquires credits and import permits worth tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars. These official favors can either be discounted for cash or used to bring in scarce goods. On one deal we know about, Sukarno himself issued a special deferred-payment license to import ten million dollars' worth of yarn. The man who bought it paid him six hundred thousand in cash."

  "How long can he keep that up?" I asked.

  "I don't know, Joe," said Holroyd wearily. He got up and reached for his raincoat. "With all his gutter affairs and all his contradictions, the handsome little man still controls the fifth most populous nation in the world. And great states can forget a lot when they are contending for the support of a stake that big. Thanks for the steak and the booze."

  I switched on the indirect spotlights framing the path to the front gate and walked him to his car. As he ducked into it he said that he would not contact me after I reached Tokyo but that I had his unlisted telephone number. He would help when he could. I nodded, thanked him, and watched his scarlet taillights recede down the narrow dirt road.

  THREE

  IN THE ENVELOPE HOLROYD HAD BROUGHT me there was more literature on puromycin and a new United Nations passport with my picture in it. The passport stated that my name was Herbert Peavy Broderick and that I was a public relations officer attached to the Paris office of UNESCO. Also included were inoculation records and several packets of currency, U.S. and Asian.

  I read the medical reports twice, but there was little new in them. An appended note from Pearsall said that no literature on human tests with puromycin had appeared in Japan. That didn't fit the notes found in MacBride's room in Djakarta, but I reflected that such wide-scale tests, in prison, might be classified by the Japanese Government. The zaibatsu swung a pretty big stick in national policy, and the new antibiotic might have industrial or military applications.

  For the next hour I sat in my study writing routine notes, transferring bank accounts, getting my affairs in order. It was the same for every trip, and I had reduced it to a minimum. Fearing that the cold rain might have kept the tigers from hunting, I went down to the basement walk-in cold room and got as much chopped horse meat as I could carry in a burlap bag.

  By the light of the concealed spots I humped the meat across the arched bridge and dumped it on the frozen ground before the black limestone figures. Went back to the house and stood waiting on the terrace.

  An hour later I heard a low snarling across the pool and saw an incredible frieze.

  Three white tigers. Standing motionless in a flood of moonlight, framed by the black bamboos. The male was poised in front, one snowy paw lifted, big head up. The tigresses were at his flanks, their narrower heads lowered. They were looking across the dark water at me, and I stared back.

  The male tiger rumbled again, lowered his paw, and the snowy trio paced on across the garden. Unhurriedly, moving with cushioned ease through the moonlight, up toward the waterfall.

  ***

  I didn't view the new contract with much relish. When you are young and boisterous, you can stride
the world in all weathers, breaking noses and swaggering like a bravo. Considering my past, I reflected that I had been a lot like the experienced whore; she didn't need to go get a thing, it was always right there with her…

  But that was a good many wounds and dubious victories ago, when I had never even checked the weather. Now I wanted to know about the storm ahead; I had been out in too many ill winds.

  In the Canary Islands I had sweated through the dusty leviche blowing off the North African deserts, and in France been chilled by the mistral. In Mexico, diamond-eyed on heroin, I had watched a hurricane level miles of towering palms like toothpicks, and adrift on the open sea beyond Tahiti had turned my back on the man-made blast from the French hydrogen-bomb test. In the Andes it had been the cloud-shrouded buffeting of the zonda.

  In Burma, driving a renegade Chinese Nationalist division into Communist China, I had reentered the damp realm of the monsoon, where fungus growths crept across everything. Five months later I was still sweating, but in a Caribbean island republic where drought caused other types of fungi to attack.

  The worst weather of all had come during my last contract, in South-West Africa. There, off the grim Skeleton Coast, I had seen tornados and waterspouts breeding in clusters, whistling fury through the darkened air.

  Each of these ill winds had cost me something. Something more enervating than the actual violence of clashing with real or supposed enemies-It was the relentless attrition of always being where the ill winds blew.

  ***

  Before noon I was in St. Louis and took the keys of my estate to the Forest Park Zoo office. Perkins was off somewhere filming a television show, and the man who would watch my tigers was not available, so I left the keys and instructions with a nice secretary and drove to Lambert Airport.

  I had been told that I was traveling commercial, but when I applied at the airline counter, there was a flurry of discussion. A car took me around the field to a hangar that belonged to an air-freight line. Parked on its apron was a huge Air Force jet tanker, and I was hustled aboard. We went nonstop to Oakland, were refueled, and took off immediately for Tokyo.

  I was the only passenger, and as the plane rustled high over the Pacific I reflected that somebody was in a hellacious hurry to get me in trouble. Where I was going this time they had an ill wind called a typhoon.

  FOUR

  THE BIG TANKER PLANE LANDED AT Haneda Airport in a driving rain that turned, the vivid lights of Tokyo into streaming slicks. As we taxied back I wondered again why the plane was using commercial fields. Going down the ramp, nodding to the Air Force sergeant, I reflected how curious it was that he and I, and the pilots and other crewmen, had flown a tremendous ocean nonstop together but were still total strangers. And whether my assignment could possibly warrant the expense of such a flight.

  The tanker had stopped, with its left jets cut off, before a darkened hangar a long way from the passenger terminal, blazing with lights. Immediately after I had stepped off the ramp carrying my single bag, those leftside jets coughed, began streaming dark smoke, and roared back to life. The big plane swung right sharply and taxied away down the strip.

  A man was waiting for me, huddled in a raincoat, just beyond the water streaming from the hangar roof. He pointed toward a tiny Toyopet sedan just around the corner and we dashed for it. When we were squeezed together on the front seat, I lighted a cheroot and looked him over by the lighter flame. He was nice-looking and undoubtedly Ivy League in origin.

  "Good trip?" he asked, striving to keep us on the proper level of banality. I marveled. I had just crossed the Pacific as the sole passenger on a military aircraft, one that did not ordinarily carry passengers at all, and he knew it because he had seen the plane arrive and depart. I wondered if the agency would ever run out of his decent, inadequate type, and decided that it had better be soon.

  "There were no problems," I answered. "What about customs?"

  "No problem there, either." He was cheerful; he started the little car and drove away from the hangar.

  "Okay. And who are you?" I asked.

  "My assignment name is Frank. I am the briefing officer."

  "With no delusions of being case officer?"

  "I was specifically instructed that you do not use case officers."

  "You were specifically instructed correctly," I said.

  Japan's culture is hidden, turned inward. As the car moved past huddled tenements and cheap-john construction, I thought of the lovely things I had seen in these islands. Long strips of freshly dyed silks, drying on the river banks outside Kyoto, the geometry of the Ryosnji Garden, its raked white sands and rooted rocks, the temple at Ise, of bleached cypress, and the little ice huts Japanese children build in Tokomachi, to play games in January…

  We joined the honking bedlam of traffic sluicing into downtown Tokyo. Past the garishly lighted bars, pachinko arcades, and sex parlors; past the high Toshiba sign, the rounded front of the Nechigeki Theater, and the flaunting, flickering, and streaming neon legends of the largest city in the world. The rain had stopped, the air stank of carbon-monoxide taints, and the tires in the heavy cavalcade of traffic made sucking sounds against the asphalt.

  "I am to drive you to Shinjuku suburb," said Frank. "There I will put you into a cab. The driver, whom we do not know, will take you on."

  "That's nice," I said, and my straight-arrow type escort danced at me.

  "What-what?" he burbled.

  "Exactly." I said, amused. "What-what? Now, Frank, it is my ass you are easing into this bind. You are going to take me to this suburb and let me out, right?"

  "Not as rough as that." he protested. "Tomorrow afternoon at two. you are to meet me in the Emerald Grill of the Hotel Okura."

  "If I'm still extant…"

  He handed me a card and said I had a room reserved at that address. It was a safe house.

  We went rolling on. At a juncture of several streets I got out of the Toyopet, pulling my bag from the tiny back seat. Slamming the door, I took the few steps to the waiting cab and ducked into it. There was only one waiting, under the bleak corner light. After another ten minutes of touring through warren streets the driver stopped before a door set in a high wooden wall.

  When I knocked, the inset door opened and a small kimono-clad maid bowed me in. I could see the part in her sleek black hair as I went by her and removed my shoes in the darkened hallway. She pattered past me and we walked by several side doors. Those on my left were open; beyond them I could see rain angling into a garden. The fall grew stronger, hammering on the wooden roof, and the little maid motioned me into the last door on the right.

  I stepped into the doorway, astonished, because I was walking into a heya, a training gym for sumo wrestiers. There was a ring, several mats outside the ring, and a darkened niche on the far side that I knew must be a Shinto shrine. It was unlighted; the only illumination in the room was a bare bulb hanging over the ring. While I was moving toward it the door to the right opened and a black sumo wrestler stepped out.

  This man would have been huge anywhere. He had to duck to enter the gym, and I made him at least 6-foot-6 and 300 pounds. He was black and he was Japanese, high cheekbones and all. His enormous belly was barely contained by the flowing robe he wore, and on top of his head the thick black hair was twisted into a large knot.

  The slight bow he gave me was perfunctory, almost contemptuous, the sort given to a gaijin interloper. I didn't return it and he stared at me impassively, flexing both hands.

  "You are Herbert Broderick?" he asked, singsonging a little but in remarkably clear English.

  "That's right."

  He opened both hands and flipped them; wet sand flew to the floor. "I am Nogi, a sumo champion. Within two years I will undoubtedly become a yokozuna."

  "Glad to hear it," I said. "I came here to discuss a matter with a man."

  "Nogi is that man," the black giant answered. "You are to talk to me."

  "Fine." I walked to the ring and sat down on the
edge of it, on the sanded surface, A canopied frame hung overhead, with the bulb in the center, and at the corners of the frame were four tassels: green, red, white, and blue. Nogi had followed me and was taking off his robe. He was barefooted and naked except for a dark breechclout.

  The enormous belly had no fat on it. Sumo wrestlers are alternately stuffed and exercised from birth; they are a sporting freak, working in a ritual encounter that is nearly two thousand years old.

  "We are a backward people in Japan," said Nogi, putting his big hands on his knees and lifting first one, then the other, meaty leg up high. With the knees unbent. "But we hear that you are a tough boy, Broderick-san."

  "That's right, Nogi-san. I'm a mean bastard."

  To my surprise the ebony giant stopped his ritual cavorting and began laughing as if he really meant it. "So am I." he said. "I am both sino-ko, a half-caste, and konketsuiji, a half-Negro bastard. My father was a black U.S. Army sergeant stationed in Hokkaido."

  "Well, well," I said, but without my heart in it. It was obvious that even if we were bastards-well-met, Nogi had some plans for me. Like an ordeal by sumo, a discipline about which I knew nothing except that it was an ancient forerunner of catch-as-catch-can wrestling.

  "Will you get into the ring with me, Broderick-san?" asked Nogi. "No hurting, only to see if you are really tough boy."

  I stared at his huge black bulk dispassionately. While flying across the Pacific in the tanker jet, I had catnapped fitfully and eaten a succession of cardboard-flavored meals washed down with cardboard-flavored milk. It could not be said that I was really bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

  In addition, someone else was watching me. Someone I could not see… I had been aware of this extra surveillance since shortly after entering the heya, and felt that it was coming from the shadowed niche of the shrine.