Hostage Tower. John Denis
She settled herself into the driving seat, and the attendant leaned in again, adopting the sort of confidential air at which Italian operatic tenors excel. He handed her a small, plain box, tied with pretty white ribbons.
‘Someone left this for you, Signorina Carver,’ he whispered through an effluvium of garlic.
‘Who?’
He shrugged extravagantly, using most of his upper body and the ends of his moustache.
‘Thank you,’ she said, and made with the lire again. The attendant decided not to push his luck with the décolletage, and backed away obsequiously. As Sabrina pulled apart the ribbons, the entente of Guilio and Roberto fractured, and they decided to settle the matter like gentlemen with the toss of a coin.
Signorina Carver’s educated fingers coped busily with the wrapping. The attendant sighed, dramatically. ‘Bella, bellissima,’ he murmured; and with good reason. She was classically, breath-catchingly lovely, with a cascade of hair shaded now to russet-brown, falling on her bare shoulders, framing a face that had more than once peered wistfully out from the front covers of Vogue and Woman’s World. Gone was the saintliness of childhood, but not to give way to artfulness or knowingness. Her brow was deep, her eyes wide-spaced and round, her nose and mouth in exquisite proportion, her chin cheekily dimpled.
How such a flower of Grecian beauty could ever have been the product of that dour, grain-encrusted Middle Western state of Iowa had baffled Fort Dodge. Sabrina had agreed, and settled the matter by leaving. Now her voice, like her face and body, was international, and she kept nothing of her childhood but her name, and her high regard for the stones which, as she could abundantly testify, were indeed a girl’s best friend.
Inside the box, in a bed of cotton wool and wrapped in tissue paper, were five one thousand US dollar bills, and a first-class airline ticket to Paris. The flight was in three days’ time. There was no explanatory note.
She stared at the money and the ticket, blinked, and then grinned as she noticed in the top left-hand corner of the ticket cover, the scrawled initials ‘L. van B’.
A coin was duly borrowed from the parking attendant, and flipped by Roberto, as Sabrina throttled warningly and released the hand-brake. Giulio shouted ‘Ciao’ while the coin was still in the air, hurdled over the back of the growling little car, and landed in the seat next to Sabrina. The Alfa screamed away and Giulio fastened his safety belt. He had never before ridden with Sabrina, but he was aware she had a reputation for a certain nonchalance at the wheel.
Upper Madison Avenue, New York City, like Fifth Avenue, is stacked with discreet, bijou little shops and boutiques catering for expensive and often esoteric tastes. There is also a sprinkling of way-out art galleries on Madison, to take advantage of the carriage trade’s lust for artifacts that no-one else possessed, nor indeed would wish to. ‘PRIMITIVES INC.’, which the elegant and faultlessly dressed black man with the pencil-thin moustache was about to enter, was one such gallery.
‘PRIMITIVES INC.’ dealt, as its name implied, in primitive art. This meant that it engaged agents, who suborned other agents who, in turn, bribed African village headmen, to lean on their tribes to produce badly carved, multi-hued bric-a-brac for half a bowl of gruel, which then sold on Upper Madison Avenue for six hundred bucks apiece.
The receptionist sat at a gleaming steel and glass desk (Stockholm, c. 1978) amid a weird but well-arranged clutter of masks, assegais and fertility symbols.
‘Good morning, Mr Whitlock,’ she smirked.
‘And to you, Mary-Lou,’ C.W. answered. Then he flashed her a brilliant smile and said, ‘Hey, that rhymes.’ Mary-Lou grinned back. He was a dish, she decided; pity he was … well, you know, black. She tried to think of a suitable rhyme for ‘C.W.’, but her intellectual equipment wasn’t up to it.
‘Anything doing, gorgeous?’ C.W. enquired.
‘It so happens,’ Mary-Lou replied coyly, ‘that yes, there is.’
C.W. was rapidly losing patience, but tried not to show it. The dumb white chicks, he mused, were even more of a pain in the ass than the smart ones, of whom there were not all that many.
‘A message, perhaps?’ he suggested.
‘In back,’ she inclined her peroxided head. ‘You know.’
‘Indeedy I do,’ C.W. simpered. He rolled his eyes as he passed her desk and crossed to the door leading to the lavish, semi-private display area behind the main gallery. Here the sculptures staring down at him from lucite shelves were, if even more wildly expensive, at least genuine and finely wrought. The semi-private nature of the rear gallery was required of the owners, because many of the costlier fertility symbols were all too explicitly fertile.
The gallery served (for a fee) as one of C.W.’s collection of New York dead-letter boxes, a facility that chimed in well with his tendency to divide his life into separate, equally secret, compartments. He had this in common with Sabrina Carver, too.
On a splendid oak refectory table sat a large, flat parcel. C.W. twisted the fastening string around his finger, and snapped the twine as if it were cotton. He shuffled aside the decorative paper wrapping, and looked with undisguised pleasure on a fresh wheel of his favourite French cheese, Brie.
C.W. selected a Pathan ornamental dagger from the wall, and cut himself a generous slice. He bit into it. The rind was deliciously crisp, the cheese at a perfect creamy consistency. C.W. munched the remainder of the slice, then set the knife into the far edge of the wheel, and cut the entire cheese precisely in half.
He dipped the blade of the dagger into one segment, and traced a path along it. Puzzled, he repeated the process on the other crescent. The point of the knife encountered an obstruction. C.W. smiled, and hooked it out.
It was a small package, enclosed in rice-paper. He scraped the rice-paper off, and unfolded five one thousand US dollar bills, and a first-class airline ticket to Paris. The flight was in three days’ time. There was no explanatory note.
He stared at the money and the ticket, blinked, and then grinned as he noticed in the top left-hand corner of the ticket cover, the scrawled initials ‘L. van B’.
‘Classy,’ C.W. said, admiringly. ‘Very classy.’ He walked out humming ‘The last time I saw Paris’.
Bureaucracy thrives on paper. Paper demands circulation. In order to facilitate distribution bureaucrats love drawing up lists that squeeze as many people as possible on to them while, in order to save paper, confining them to a single sheet. Thus was born the acronym, an indispensable arm of bureaucracy.
The United Nations is bureaucracy run riot, and acronyms proliferate there like hamsters. Few of them are important. One, in a little-frequented part of the UN Building in New York, scarcely rates a second glance. The sign on the office door says: ‘UNACO’. And below that: ‘Malcolm G. Philpott, Director’. And underneath, ‘Sonya Kolchinsky, Assistant Director’.
This acronym is misleadingly innocent, since ‘UNACO’ stands for ‘United Nations Anti-Crime Organization’, and it is very important indeed.
Sonya Kolchinsky picked up the ornate silver tray and carried it carefully across the room to Philpott’s desk. Philpott’s desk, like Philpott, was invariably tidy; there was plenty of space to set down the tray, which she did, again carefully. It bore a small espresso coffee machine, and cups and saucers in delicate china from a full service. Next to the silver sugar bowl and cream jug stood a cut-glass crystal decanter of brandy.
Sonya poured out a cup of coffee, and added a half spoonful of demerara sugar. She stirred the brew and, without asking Philpott, slipped in a touch, measured almost in droplets, of Remy Martin. She stirred the contents again, then topped it up with cream. Philpott, his eyes still glued to a file on his desk, raised the cup to his lips and sipped.
‘Delicious,’ he remarked, absently.
‘I know,’ she said.
He looked