Modesty Blaise Read online

  “I shall enjoy a Petit Corona, thank you. But what if you had been expecting me, Miss Blaise?”

  “You smoke a Punch-Punch claro, I believe.”

  “I do.” He rolled the cigar gently between his fingers, watching her as she returned to her seat. “Willie Garvin has an eye for detail. Your dossier on me must be quite exhaustive.”

  “It was. But it wasn’t dull. Please go on, Mr. Fraser.”

  “The group,” said Fraser, turning a page, “under the, ah, new management, became known in due course as The Network and operated on an international scale. The crimes included art and jewel thefts; smuggling; currency and gold manipulations; and an espionage service.”

  “My own information,” she said, exhaling a feather of smoke, “is that The Network at no time traded in secrets belonging to Her Majesty’s Government.”

  “We have wondered about that,” Tarrant said reflectively. “Can you suggest a reason?”

  “It might be that the responsible person wanted to settle here eventually, and had no wish to be considered undesirable.”

  “Why here?”

  “That could be a long story. I don’t think it’s important.”

  “We also note,” Fraser said dubiously, “that The Network abstained completely from two profitable fields of crime, drugs and vice. On two occasions it gave valuable help to the United States Bureau of Narcotics.”

  She nodded. “So I believe. I suppose if one takes a point of view one must act positively when opportunity offers.”

  “In 1962,” said Fraser, “we have as a fact that you married and divorced a derelict Englishman in Beirut. We believe this was a purely financial arrangement for gaining British nationality.”

  “Yes. Very purely.” Again the sudden smile briefly lit her face. Fraser cleared his throat, looked embarrassed, and stared down at the typescript.

  “So,” he went on, “we now go back to the time two or three years after you started The Network, when you were joined by William Garvin. We have his personal dossier as an appendix here.” He fluttered some pages. “He was in an approved school in England, and later served two short prison sentences before disappearing abroad. There, for a number of years, he was in many kinds of trouble in different parts of the world. I will omit what details we have, but we believe you found him in Saigon, soon after he was discharged from the Foreign Legion. From that point on, we, ah, move into the field of speculation again.”

  Fraser paused and drank some brandy. Fraser was a brandy man, and Tarrant watched with interest his struggle to suppress a look of astonished pleasure. Bravely, after a frozen moment, Fraser put down the glass and wrinkled his nose noncommittally.

  “It would seem,” he said, returning to the dossier, “that Garvin was a close associate of yours for six or seven years, Miss Blaise, until last year, in fact, when The Network was split up among its various, er, branch managers in different countries.”

  He closed the folder and looked up archly. “We know that you both came to this country eleven months ago, Miss Blaise, and we know that Garvin bought a public house called the Treadmill, on the river. We also know that you are both extremely wealthy, which may explain why there has been no hint”, he paused and gave a furtive leer, “of any, um, illegal activities since that time.”

  “Very good,” said Tarrant. “Beautifully articulated, Fraser. You have delightful vowels.” He received the expected simper of demurral, and glanced across at Modesty Blaise inquiringly.

  “It’s interesting,” she said slowly, “but as you say, mainly speculation. I don’t feel you can use it for any drastic move.”

  “I’ve no thought of using it.” Tarrant paused, and there was silence. One good thing about this girl was that silence didn’t worry her. She allowed time to think, without rushing to fill the gaps.

  Tarrant was thinking now, and he was conscious of disappointment. The girl fascinated him. She was beautiful and stimulating. Her serenity, against the strange dark background of her life, was enormously exciting. But so far there was something missing, a quality he had learned to sense in his agents as he could sense the quality of a fine cigar before smoking it.

  This was a thing hard to define. More of a potential than a quality, perhaps. The potential for cold ferocity joined to an inflexible will. Good God, she must have had it once. Could she have lost it now? So far he had caught no hint of it in Modesty Blaise. She was perfectly relaxed, perfectly controlled, and that was right. But he could detect nothing of the vital potential to turn tiger. Was the core of steel rusted and the flame of will dead?

  “Far from using our suspicions against you in any way,” he said amiably, “We rather hoped you might be useful to us.”

  She drank from the glass of red wine, not taking her eyes from him.

  “Nobody uses me, Sir Gerald,” she answered very quietly. “Nobody. I made up my mind about that long ago, before that dossier begins.”

  “I understand. But I hoped to persuade you.”

  “How?” She looked at him curiously. Tarrant studied the tip of his cigar and glanced casually across at Fraser, who sat with one hand resting on his knee. The fingers and thumb were straight, and close together; the hand was palm down. Fraser’s opinion was that this should be played straight. Tarrant agreed.

  “We realize it would be pointless to offer you money, Miss Blaise,” he said. “But we can offer you Willie Garvín.”

  “Willie?” The dark eyebrows arched upward.

  “Yes. Have you been in touch with him recently?”

  “Not for about six weeks. Then he was in town for a couple of nights and spent them here. We went back to the Treadmill together for the weekend to try his new speedboat. After that I spent a month with some friends in Capri, and got back a week ago. I haven’t been in touch again yet.”

  “You won’t find him at the Treadmill.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me. Willie’s dream of running his own little pub has palled rather quickly. He moves around quite a lot, and he has a wonderfully varied list of girl friends. From premier cru to honest vin du pays.”

  “Garvin isn’t indulging his romantic palate. He’s a very long way away, on the other side of the world. And he’s in prison, Miss Blaise. Not under his own name, I may say. But I suppose it hardly matters what name a man is hanged, under.”

  Then it came, and Tarrant savored it with infinite joy. Modesty Blaise had not changed her expression or posture by a hair’s-breadth. She still sat with legs drawn up at one end of the couch, the glass of wine in her hand. Nothing had altered. Yet suddenly the whole room seemed charged with the crackling emanation of force from that still figure.

  To Tarrant it came as the briny scent of a storm, when the static potential builds up to breaking point before discharging to earth in a savage explosion of energy.

  “Hanged?” Her voice was still mellow. As mellow, thought Tarrant, as the martial call of Roland’s horn.

  “Or shot,” he answered with a slight gesture. “It’s not exactly imminent because the situation in … in the place where Garvin finds himself is still a little confused. I feel there might just be time for somebody to do something, if they managed it within the next eight or nine days.”

  Modesty Blaise crushed out the half-smoked Perfecto Fino and drew a jar of Sčvres porcelain toward her. From it she took thick black tobacco and a yellow paper. Absently, with practiced ease, she spread tobacco along the paper, rolled and lit it.

  “This is all a little cryptic, Sir Gerald,” she said.

  “Yes. Intentionally so, of course.”

  “You want to use me for?”

  “For one operation,” he broke in quickly. “One special job, my dear. That’s all. It’s something you’re uniquely fitted for, and it may prove to be no more than a watching brief.”

  “In return, you’ll tell me where Willie Garvin is now?”

  Her question hung on the air. Tarrant drank and put down his glass. Fraser’s hand, still resting on his knee
, had turned and was loosely curled. Opinion, put the screw on hard. Tarrant reviewed the advice and rejected it.

  “No,” he said, rising. “We’ll make it a gift, Miss Blaise. And we’ll go now, since I’m sure you’ll have a lot to arrange in a very short time. Fraser, pass Miss Blaise the copy of that message, please.”

  For an instant Fraser’s eyes widened in genuine surprise, then he recovered and ducked his head obsequiously, fumbling in his briefcase. She took the buff half-sheet from him and paced slowly across to the huge window, reading it, the cigarette clipped between her fingers.

  “Thank you.” She returned to where the two men stood waiting, and handed the slip to Fraser, her eyes on Tarrant. “I take it this job of yours isn’t too immediate, Sir Gerald? I shall be out of the country for the next ten days or so.”

  “If I might talk to you when you return, it would be very satisfactory.” He took her hand. “Goodbye, and I hope your trip goes well.”

  “Thank you again.” She walked with them to the raised foyer and the lift. The doors slid back as she pressed two buttons on the control panel.

  “You’re a clever man, Sir Gerald.” She looked at him with frank interest. “How did you know?”

  “I’m sorry. Know what?”

  “That I hate blackmail. But that I’m a compulsive payer of debts. I’m sure that isn’t in my dossier.”

  “No.” Tarrant picked up his hat and umbrella. “But I’ve met your Willie Garvin.”

  “He wouldn’t have discussed me.”

  “Indeed not. But he’s not an enigma, I found him easy to read. And I felt he must reflect you. After all, you created him.”

  Fraser seized the opening.

  “Like master, like man,” he said portentously and with hidden delight.

  When the two men had gone she stood by the window looking out across the dark park while she finished her cigarette. Once she half smiled and shook her head.

  “Should have seen it coming,” she murmured. “Hard to blame you, Willie. My God, I know just how you felt.”

  She stubbed out the cigarette and went to the telephone. For the next hour she was busy making several calls, one to a startled man eight thousand miles away. When this was done she went through into her bedroom of pale green, ivory and silver-gray. The wall was paneled, and the panel to the right of the big double bed was of painted steel. It opened by the setting of the dressing-table drawers in a particular order and position, and it moved on soundless bearings.

  Beyond lay a tall cubbyhole, six feet square, originally intended as a walk-in wardrobe. For a moment she stood looking at the three heavy trunks which stood on the floor, and at the variety of smaller boxes on the side shelves. There was a glint of amused resignation in her eyes.

  “I wonder why we kept all our gear, Willie love?” she said aloud.

  Bending, she began to open one of the trunks.

  In the parked car, Fraser sat behind the wheel and spoke with the pinched approval of the loser congratulating the winner.

  “I feel you handled that with great success, Sir Gerald, if I may say so. I didn’t dare to hope that putting her in debt would be so effective.”

  “You may say so, Fraser. You may. But I take it you realize that putting her in our debt was almost irrelevant?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “She’s lived on a dangerous tightrope for the best part of twenty-six years. How easy do you think it is to stop?”

  “But she has achieved her ambition, sir. Half a million or so, and a life to match.”

  “Meaningless. Or tragic, perhaps. Danger can be a drug, and she’s hooked by it. Dammit man, you were still hooked by it yourself at nearly twice her age. I had to drag you behind a desk. This girl doesn’t show it, of course. She’s totally controlled. But the withdrawal pains must be there.” His voice grew dry. “They didn’t show with Willie Garvin until now.”

  “I’m sorry.” Fraser swallowed miserably and shot him a hunted look. “I haven’t taken your point yet, sir. You seem to be saying that putting her in debt over Garvin isn’t the real reason that we were able to get her.”

  “It’s the excuse,” Tarrant said softly. “She needed an excuse, whether she knows it or not. I wasn’t looking for a way to force her. I was looking for the right way to let her do this job for us, Jack.”

  The use of the first name called a halt to the game Fraser loved, and signaled that for the time being play was suspended. Fraser relaxed and rested his arms on the wheel, a slow grin spreading over his face.

  “Well I’ll be darned,” he said admiringly. “You sly old fox.”

  2

  Modesty Blaise stood with her flank against the trunk of a palm, some ten feet from the thinning fringe of trees. Night had long since fallen. The bellbirds and parrots were silent, and from behind her there came only the rustle and murmur of the living forest. From a star-splashed sky a waning moon glinted down upon the metaled road which wound between the forest and the savanna.

  The prison stood in a half-circle of beaten earth where the ground had been cleared in a wide curve reaching back from the road. It was a temporary prison, converted from a barracks, a long single-storeyed building of adobe, shaped like a letter T. The cross of the T faced the road, the upright jutted back toward the trees, with a wide door at its base. Immediately beyond the door lay the guardroom.

  Modesty had stood there, motionless, for two hours now. Every ten minutes a ragged sentry with a slung Garand rifle passed within thirty feet of her on his beat. A useless sentry, she thought. You could hear him coming and going, catch the clink of a rifle on bandolier, and see the red glow of his cigarette a hundred yards away.

  Six weeks ago he had been a rebel. Now he and the rest of his friends were government troops. The ex-government troops were now the rebels, but not for much longer. General Kalzaro’s coup had succeeded beyond the point of reverse, beyond the point where he needed to be prudent about disposing of those who had fought on the losing side.

  Six days had passed since her meeting with Tarrant, and she knew now that his assessment of the situation had been a shrewd one. Santos, in Buenos Aires, had confirmed that assessment only forty-eight hours ago. If Willie Garvin was to be brought out alive it would have to be very soon.

  She wore black denim slacks, loose enough in the leg for free movement, the bottoms tucked into thick-soled combat boots. A thin black polo-neck sweater covered her body, neck and arms. Her hands and face were dark with camouflage cream. The high chignon of her hair was now a short, tightly bound club hanging at the nape of her neck.

  She watched a ramshackle truck pull away from the prison and out on to the road. Its grass-stuffed tires squealed as it jolted away round the bend, carrying the day guards who supervised working parties of prisoners repairing the road two miles north. Fifteen minutes later the sentry patrolling this rear beat of the unfenced perimeter was relieved.

  Soon now she could begin. The tingling warmth within her spread in a glow of curious happiness through every part of her being. She resented it, tried to quell it, then yielded in the wry knowledge of wasted energy.

  You couldn’t make yourself over again at twenty-six. She had learned that lesson over the past twelve months. Willie must have learned it too, and studiously hidden it from her as she had hidden it from him.

  In the dark years long gone, almost from the first dawnings of memory, each night and each day had held fear and danger for the lone child moving like some small wild creature through the war turmoil of the Balkans and the Levant. But later, with puberty, there came a time when fear was transmuted into stimulus, and the moments of danger which had once brought terror now brought only a keener sense of being alive.

  It was a pity. There were so many better ways of living fully. But it was too late now, and she had long ago learned not to cry for the unattainable.

  The new sentry was starting his return beat from the west. Modesty flexed her fingers round the little object in her right hand. I
t was a kongo, or yawara stick, a thing of hard smooth wood, shaped like an elongated dumbbell so that the shaft fitted into the palm with the mushroom-shaped ends protruding from the clenched fist.

  Placing her feet carefully, she moved forward. There was no sound, for the ground was covered with a thick moist carpet of rotting leaves.

  The sentry was thinking about women, specifically about a girl in the village they had taken a week ago. That had been a night. He grinned at the memory, his blood stirring.

  She was about eighteen, and completely new to it, but obedient as a cowed bitch once Sergeant Alvarez had explained how it would be for her otherwise. It was Alvarez, too, who had produced the amusing idea of offering a bottle of whisky to whichever of the six men could devise the most imaginative position.

  Ricco had won, of course. The sentry chuckled admiringly at the memory. It was a miracle the old sod hadn’t pulled a leg muscle, or suffocated the girl.

  Something white lay on the ground ahead and to one side, near the bole of a tree. He moved forward, peering. It was a square piece of paper, but with something resting on it. He bent closer. A coin. A gold coin …

  Modesty moved out behind the bent form. One hand darted out to grip him by the hair, the other came down like a hammer, the lower butt of the kongo striking precisely below the ear.

  He slumped bonelessly, and she caught the rifle, lowering it with him. From the small pocket on her left thigh she took a slender metal tube and uncapped it. Into her palm she tipped two little white cylinders of compressed cottonwool, about the size of cigarette-tips. She sniffed them warily, catching the faint, sickly sweet smell, then knelt and slid them into the man’s nostrils.

  Her feet made no sound as she moved swiftly across the open stretch of beaten earth toward the pool of light which spread from the lamp above the open door. Here, to one side of the door, a man leaned against the wall looking at a tattered girlie magazine, his rifle propped beside him. She circled a little to approach him from the side, edging along the wall, her back flat against it.